


Into the Deep

by bob_fish, enemytosleep



Series: The Jungle Adventure of Doom [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst and Humor, Canon Compliant, Illustrations, M/M, Post Ep99
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 08:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23468176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bob_fish/pseuds/bob_fish, https://archiveofourown.org/users/enemytosleep/pseuds/enemytosleep
Summary: Fjord holds out a hand for him, and then Essek breathes again. He begins to climb. He’s a fast learner, he always has been; and he’s learned that this group will be fine here, so long as they don’t have to drag him up the temple wall themselves.“They’re almost here! C’mon!” Beauregard calls, looking back towards the pack of eelhounds.“Keep climbing!” Fjord yells.Essek doesn’t look back. He keeps pushing, even when the pain in his leg shoots up through his hip every time he pushes off with that side. The muscles of his legs and arms are still shaky, his heart pounding in his throat. He grits his teeth together. He can do this. One stone step at a time. He can hear Yasha as she growls, feral and angry. He’s almost at the top. One more step. One more.____Or the fic where Essek and TM9 investigate a temple of Uk'otoa.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast, The Mighty Nein & Essek Thelyss
Series: The Jungle Adventure of Doom [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1682572
Comments: 153
Kudos: 335
Collections: Essek Week





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Illustrations are by the ever talented bob_fish!

_I may be getting used to this_ , Essek thinks as he rouses himself in the deep of the jungle night. Next to him, Caleb rubs a hand over his face, then sits up and pats at Essek’s shoulder. 

“Sleep more if you need,” Caleb whispers. “It’s my watch.”

Essek smiles and shakes his head. “I’ve had enough now. I’m up.”

“Ah.” Caleb takes a pull on his waterskin as Essek sits up, and Essek spots him surreptitiously covering his mouth with one hand to check his breath. Essek’s lips twitch. Caleb is charming like this, hair slipping out of his ponytail and still a little sleepy.

His watch now over, Caduceus is settling to sleep on the other side of the dome. They have the night to themselves, somewhat. Essek leans in and kisses Caleb good morning. 

“It sounds useful,” Caleb says. “Needing only a few hours of rest. The peace of the night can be the best time for getting things done.”

“Mm,” Essek agrees. “The unfortunate thing is that so many people find it acceptable to call in the dead of night. I’ve always envied those who get left alone for eight hours.” 

Caleb chuckles quietly. “If you mean Jester, she does that to everyone.”

“Not specifically. It’s a common malady where I come from.” He leans in, suddenly seized with an impulse. “But I agree with you about the night.” He kisses Caleb lightly on the lips. “The best time to accomplish things.”

Caleb grins, then ducks his head. Then he puts a finger under Essek’s chin, leans in and kisses him back. 

It goes further than either of them intend. Essek imagined just one little kiss, a gesture and a tease. He soon discovers that as is apparently usual, he’s fooled himself. The second kiss leads to a third, and to putting his hands into Caleb’s hair, their bodies drawn together, and soon they are both a little breathless and the spark between them is becoming quite, quite out of control. His hand on Caleb’s thigh slides up, and Caleb shifts, and then suddenly they both meet each others’ eyes and seem to jolt at the same time back to reality. They are in the dome, which is full of six other people. Essek glances around. Somehow, everyone else appears to be sleeping. Moreover, Caleb is keeping watch, and this jungle—the pull of healed skin at his side tells him quite clearly—is a dangerous place. Caleb’s lips are very pink, his hair a mess. Essek looks down. He hasn’t had this little control over himself in so, so long. He forgot the power of it. 

Caleb groans softly and presses his forehead into Essek’s shoulder. “Believe me,” he says. “I would like nothing, nothing at all better at this moment.”

Essek nods and sighs. He leans his cheek onto the top of Caleb’s head. “So, a watch, then,” he says. 

Caleb swings a leg out of his lap and sits next to him. Essek draws his knees up to his chest and takes a deep breath. Caleb leans in and whispers. “You are so beautiful.” His breath tickles in Essek’s ear. “After this, after this business with the temple.”

What _will_ Essek do after this? How long will he extend this stay with the Mighty Nein? The thought is uncomfortable on a number of levels. Perhaps, though—certainly, whatever he does, he can spend an hour or two after he returns the Nein to their ship. He turns, catches Caleb’s eye. “I think after this,” he whispers, “for the sake of both our ability to concentrate, we had better take a little time together, privately.”

_____________________

It only takes one soft call from Caleb for Veth to rouse herself. Without the fog of alcohol in her system, she’s found she’s a deeper sleeper and a far better riser. She rubs a hand over her face (and it’s still a shock, her round cheeks and the unfamiliar set of her eyes), sits up, and finds her crossbow. 

The wizards are sitting about a foot apart, both cross-legged. Essek has a book out, and is focussing upon it intently. “Good morning!” Caleb says, a little manic. “It’s four o’clock. It’s your watch, nothing to report, and I am going to sleep.” He pulls his legs into his bedroll and curls up on his side. 

“Sleep well, Caleb.” Veth says drily. This is what it’s going to be like having a teenager, isn’t it?

Essek, hair noticeably and uncharacteristically mussed, continues to stare diligently at his book, as if he has not noticed she’s there. He’s absolutely noticed she’s there. He turns a page. Well, he can stew a little. It’s probably time she had a word, and this isn’t a bad moment to do it. 

First, she waits for Caleb to fall asleep. It doesn’t take long: like her, he learned long ago to snatch sleep anywhere at will. His inhales deepen and slow, and he starts to breathe through his nose. She knows that shift, that sound by heart, having listened for it countless times in the night when she was guarding him, or waiting to sneak out to find them food, or scratch an itch. It’s comforting to hear: familiar. 

So much is changing around her. 

She tries to gather her thoughts into something more … just more. She’s never been good at speaking like Caleb, or even Fjord. They always have the right timing, the right — she’s not even sure. She’d be better at this if she did, but she’s going to talk herself out of this if she keeps building it up. 

“Essek,” she says, more loudly than she’d meant. “I need a word with you.”

Essek looks up from the book he wasn’t reading and raises an eyebrow. That doesn’t improve her mood. 

“So,” she says, “you’re on the team now and all?”

Essek seems more thrown than she expected. “You said there might be a place for me.”

“Yeah, I did.” And then he took that statement and really ran with it, huh? She woke up the next morning to find him and Caleb spooning and kissy and holding hands. “So, you and Caleb, now? Fast moves.”

“The move wasn’t mine.” Essek looks off to one side and smiles. “But I’m very glad it was made.”

Veth blinks, and narrows her eyes. Does she believe him? Yes, actually, she does. _Oh, Caleb._

“I’m finding it a little difficult to keep up with all your changes of opinion concerning me,” Essek says. He doesn’t even look at her. 

“Well, my opinions are finding it difficult to keep up with you,” Veth snaps. The moment she says that, she realises how that kiss must have happened. Remembers Caleb screaming for Jester the second the displacer beasts were all down, running to Essek’s body and crashing to his knees — and Veth had thought, _it’s happened again_. For a moment she honestly thought he’d just died, died after stepping onto the front line of a fight, the spot skinny wizards should stay the fuck away from, to save Fjord and Yasha from a fight they could have handled perfectly well. It was an awful feeling even for her, to see Essek go down, maybe dead. It had obviously been worse for Caleb … whenever Caleb decides something, he _decides_. Doesn’t mean his friends can’t keep looking out for him, though. 

“You don’t trust me,” Essek says. His voice is calm and quiet and even. 

Veth shrugs. “I don’t. Not all the way.”

Essek seems to consider his words for a moment. “That’s understandable.”

Caleb, somehow still asleep, rolls his cheek against Essek’s thigh. Essek strokes his hair. It’s—aggravating. Unsettling. Caleb, who is so slow to trust, who takes months on end to let his guard down, has let this person into his heart so quickly. Veth wants to speculate wildly, half-jokingly about charm effects and love potions, like maybe Essek is a succubus. She knows that’s ridiculous. She knows, too, she should be fairer than this. She doesn’t _feel_ like being fair. 

“Caleb trusts you,” she says. “All the way. Or near enough. I think you know that.”

She sees Essek’s calm drop for a moment. Good; the calm was starting to drive her nuts. His fingers hesitate over Caleb’s hair. He looks up at Veth. It’s one of those funny moments Essek has where he seems to shrink before her eyes, to look small and awkward and young. But that other side of him, the creature who smoothly lied and betrayed and started a war, who tortured Yeza and crushed that scourger’s chest with a gesture, easy as crumpling a sheet of paper? That’s real too. She won’t forget that.

“Listen,” she says. “Caleb is one of the most important people in the whole world to me. Do you understand? Probably as much as my family.” Maybe more so, in some ways, but she doesn’t want to admit that to this one. “He _is_ family. And I’ve been protecting him a long time.”

“I see,” Essek says. His voice is still low and calm, but it’s lost that snippy edge. Good. 

“And if he’s trusting you with his heart, that kind of brings you into my family. And I’m not really ready for that. I don’t hate you, and I see you’re—trying, but. I can’t wrap my head around some of the stuff you’ve done. It’s not that any of us are perfect, but you started a whole war. Trying is one thing, but not overnight, not literally overnight. I mean, you _kidnapped and tortured_ my husband! How can I ever forgive you for that?”

“Ah. The halfling man.” Essek looks at the ground.

“No, you look at me while I say this.” He does. “I get that part of your job is kidnap and torture — that _is_ your job, right? The Shadowhand?” She waves her hands and shakes her head. She’s getting off track. “But that’s besides the point. I don’t know if I can ever accept what you did, even if it was just part of the war or whatever. It sucked and Yeza didn’t deserve that. He deserves so much better.”

Veth can feel the tears beginning to well and she swipes the back of her hand over her face.

“I know this is no consolation, but please know that it was never personal.”

“I _know_ that!”

Caduceus stirs with a loud snort. They both glance to see if he wakes, but he lies in place and squeezes his bedding to him.

“For what it may be worth: I will never deceive you again. Any of you. You have my word.” 

“And … I’m supposed to just trust your word? After everything?”

“That … is a very fair point.” He’s still looking her in the eye; it’s the longest he’s managed to hold her gaze in this whole conversation. She feels oddly glad to have gotten through to him enough that he doesn’t want to look at her, but also that he’s trying to do it anyway. Something of that awkward young look has come into his expression again. It strikes her for a moment that he’s not trying to gain her sympathy. He seems to have just about enough social adeptness for one front only: the chilly, intimidating floaty guy in the big cloak. 

“Well,” Veth says. “I guess that will have to do for now.”

“It’s what I have,” Essek says. 

“It’s … a start.” 

“Yes.”

“But if you step out of line … don’t make me have to kill you.” She cocks her crossbow and eyes him assessingly. 

“If you really want to kill me,” Essek says, “it will take a little more than that.”

Veth looks down at her crossbow. It’s a fair point. “I could poison you,” she said. “I’m pretty good at that. You’d never see it coming.”

“Evidently,” Essek says with a small grin.

She chuckles before she means to. She can’t even tell if the joke is aimed at her or at Essek himself. He’s a dry motherfucker. She kind of likes that. She doesn’t want to like that. 

Everything is changing around here. It’s too fast. She can’t keep up. She can’t keep up with how _she_ has changed. Veth sighs and looks out into the darkened jungle. Wow, she really can’t see shit out there. She kind of misses being able to see in the dark. 

The truth is, she isn’t sure who she is any more. 

She’s not Nott the Brave, and she’s glad, really so glad; she was beyond ready. She’s free of the prickling wrongness of her own skin, the horror of gradually losing herself day by day. She’s also not that shy girl who was so grateful for any crumb of good, for the sweet and brilliant husband and the healthy mischievous boy who both seem too good for her, as if she’s stolen the life of someone more deserving. Her self-esteem was always rotten; she’s lucky she didn’t end up with some bullying asshole.

Yeza has been wonderful, really. He’s her biggest cheerleader. It’s not him that’s the problem. Is there a problem? There shouldn’t be a problem. She’s solved all her problems, hasn’t she? She’s got herself back, and her husband and son. And … she’s still here, in the jungle. Here, with a feeling in her bones they’re building towards something, a grand confrontation on a stage too big for her to wrap her head around. She’s here and her family’s back in Nicodranas, waiting patiently for her not to die while saving the world. 

Essek has gone back to hiding in his book. Of course he has. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say next to him anyway. Maybe the conversation’s about as done as it’s going to get.

That spell that restored her is partly his. It’s an uneasy feeling, knowing that his work is mixed in there so thoroughly with Caleb’s, with hers. It’s uneasy thinking about how well they worked together, especially the sneaking feeling that they might not have cracked it without him. She owes Essek Thelyss, personally; and that doesn’t feel so great now. She likes him too, sometimes, and that doesn’t feel so great either. He’s a hot mess, his evil schemes are pretty terrible, and he’s painfully grateful when people are kind to him. 

She just needs the world to slow down for a few moments so she can catch her breath and make some sense of it all. She knows it won’t.

Essek is casually stroking Caleb’s hair again as he pretends to read. Well, Veth really hopes this development won’t come back to bite them all in the ass. Until she’s sure it won’t, she’ll watch Caleb’s back for him, like always. That’s at least something in her life that hasn’t changed. That’s what she has right now, and it, too, will have to do. 

_____________________

All they have to do is swim halfway across the lake to the temple there. It’s totally doable. Absolutely. It’s a straight shot, and they’ve swum much further before beneath the depths of the ocean. This shouldn’t be too hard; except Fjord knows nothing the Mighty Nein does is ever as easy as it should be, and the fact that this task is connected to his past mistakes weighs on his chest with crushing force. It’s a feeling so similar to that of his nightmares: _Wander. Punish. Return._ Cold waters drowning him as his body is crushed by the leviathan asshole he’s been bound to. He shivers as the morning air washes over him like ice. 

He closes his eyes and breathes through his nose a few times, deep and then deeper still. He tries to recall the warm embrace of the tides the Wildmother has shown him in her own visions. It helps more than he can explain.

“Everyone ready?” he calls to the group. 

“Not yet,” Jester replies. She hooks her thumbs into the pink straps of her haversack and twirls in place, her tail narrowly missing Caleb’s face.

Caleb is still sitting on the ground, surrounded by amber stones and books. The rest of the group seems to be ready, though, Yasha and Caduceus chatting quietly as Essek adjusts the strap of his messenger bag to fit it more tightly to him. 

There’s a brief flash of light. The books around Caleb are now gone, and he’s gathering up the stones. 

“I’m ready, Captain.” He gives Fjord a curious look, but it doesn’t worry him much. Caleb has shown himself again and again and again to have Fjord’s back, no matter how dark things get.

Fjord clears his throat, loudly. “Okay, Yasha and Beau? We’re gonna need you two to help keep a perimeter ‘round the group.” After himself, they’re the strongest swimmers, and he worries that much less about them in this task.

He turns and points to Veth. She jolts from her thoughts with a small yell. “Veth, I’m gonna need you as a gunner: crossbow on the ready from above.”

“Aye, Captain!” She begins loading her weapon immediately. He relaxes some when he sees she’s grabbing standard, non-explosive bolts from her quiver. 

“Everyone else, keep your eyes on a swivel, especially you, Caduceus. If all goes well, we’ll just make our way across no problems.”

It’s one of those _speak it into existence_ moments. 

Caduceus offers Fjord one of his signature, sage expressions, then leads the way. Caduceus always has such a calming peace to him, which Fjord appreciates even more in these moments. Everyone begins following, making their way down to the shore. Essek looks nervous, but he holds onto the leather strap of his bag with both hands and follows them down all the same. Caleb flicks his eyes toward Essek, then Fjord. He waits.

“Caleb,” Fjord says quietly as he approaches. “Keep an eye on him if you can. Make sure he doesn’t put himself in more danger than he needs to.”

“Of course.”

“But the same goes for you: don’t put yourself in more danger than you need to. I—“ Fjord falters.

Caleb places a hand on Fjord’s shoulder and squeezes. “We made a promise, you and I. To have each other’s backs. I have not forgotten.”

Fjord nods and extends his arm. Caleb grasps his forearm, much like he did that day, way back then in the dark deep. Fjord squeezes back, and then they walk in silence. Caleb eventually breaks away to catch up to Essek. He touches Essek’s elbow lightly, then takes the drow’s hand in his as they walk side-by-side.

It’s a curious thing, the bond these two wizards share. Fjord doesn’t know if he can quite relate to those feelings, but he’s happy for Caleb, if this is what he wants. He hopes it’s good for Essek too, but Fjord knows too little of him to be sure.

The Mighty Nein are waiting at the edge of the lake as he approaches. Fjord takes the first step into the water. It’s cool, but pleasantly so, and he wades in until the water laps at his belt. Beau is right behind him, steadfast, and the others slowly follow. Essek has taken up floating again. Fjord thinks back for a moment … this might be the first float on this journey. He’s definitely done a lot of walking. Beau would know, but now isn’t the time for those sorts of questions. It’s curious, though, that he’s stuck to walking for so long, when nearly all of the time they’ve known him he’s kept his feet off the ground. 

Veth is the last to leave the shore, carefully setting her boots upon the water’s surface and taking a few tentative steps. The water ripples gently at her footfalls, but the magic keeps her from sinking in. There’s also the magic he cast to keep the group from drowning, which Fjord hopes is some comfort to her as it is to him.

“Let’s go,” Fjord says. He kicks off the silt and starts swimming. 

There’s a phenomenon in nature, one Fjord knows well from his time at sea: there is a quiet before each storm, an unnatural stillness that signals the incoming chaos. He feels it in his bones as they swim into deeper waters. 

The lake is somewhat clear, as far as lake water goes. He’s mostly dealt in saltwater, but when the lake bottom slopes off beyond their reach, he still feels like he could see a good ways down. He’s been checking at intervals, laying his face to dip beneath the surface. He flips to his side at intervals too, so that he can make sure all of the Nein are still keeping pace.

Beau and Yasha swim in easy long strokes on opposite sides of the group, with Veth and Essek taking up the rear. They make a curious pair: one halfling stomping her boots on the surface of the lake with a loaded crossbow, and one drow floating nearby, the slightest depression in the water beneath him as he hovers above. Satisfied, Fjord flips himself back to a comfortable breaststroke and takes another peek below. 

Oh, _shit._

He can’t see anything in particular, but then, that’s part of the problem. The water suddenly seems murkier, darker. That dark shape below is rippling, moving, getting closer. 

“Hey guys,” he calls out, “something’s coming.”

He summons the Star Razor and takes a dive below. Out of habit, it takes him a minute before he breathes in again, filling his lungs with chill lake water; he’s still so unused to that gift, so unsure as to why he still has it. The murky water churns and he catches a glimpse of something. The dark cloud below them is rising. 

Something streaks out from the murk, darting through the water towards the group. Caduceus’ long legs are kicking awkwardly, far deeper under the water than any of the others. Fjord has a momentary, horrified sense of what is about to happen—then something latches onto Caduceus’ leg, takes hold, and dives straight back down. 

Fjord hears a muffled shout from the surface before Caduceus is dragged under the water, thrashing in pain and surprise. The water around his leg is blooming red where the creature has him. 

Trying to drag Caduceus is slowing down the creature enough that Fjord has a good look at it for the first time. It’s a grotesque eel-like creature, slick with slime, with a powerful tail and webbed paws, almost like some sort of misshapen water canine. Its fishlike face is all mouth, a long, heavy jaw lined with nasty-looking needle teeth currently buried in Caduceus’s calf. Whatever this fucker is, it’s made a mistake. 

Fjord conjures some eldritch energy and fires on the eel-thing: once, twice, three times. It releases its grip on Caduceus—there!—and curls in on itself in pain with an echoing screech. A cloud of dark blood is drifting from its mouth. 

The murky cloud below them springs to life.

Four, five, more of these creatures emerge, darting straight toward the wounded eelhound. They start to tear it apart: diving strikes that take large chunks of flesh with them as they streak past. The water is swirling with tendrils of eel slime and silt from where they must have been waiting below. 

“What the fuck?” Beau shouts. Her voice is distorted slightly by the water between them.

Fjord swims to Caduceus with rapid strokes and hooks an arm around him, starts to drag him back to the surface. 

“Well, that’s interesting,” Caduceus says, looking back at the eelhounds. The wounded creature has stopped moving. It drifts in the water like flotsam as the others continue to shred its body to scraps. Caduceus looks back at Fjord. “We need to _move_.”

Fjord clenches his jaw. “Keep. Swimming.” 

_____________________

Essek was hoping faintly for at least an uneventful crossing to the temple. Some of it, he’s been informed cheerfully, will be flooded, but he can at least put off the moment he has to make use of the generously given spell that will let him breathe dirty, algae-filled lake water. 

When Fjord shouts a warning to them all, Essek’s jolt of shock rapidly curdles into resignation. Trouble: of course. He hovers a couple of inches higher. A moment later, Caduceus vanishes under the water’s surface with a shout of alarm, and the rest of the Mighty Nein almost immediately dive below the surface to follow him. Essek stares at the water, which seems to grow more murky with each passing moment. He still has no idea _what_ is below, nor what he can do about it. This feeling is becoming familiar; he still loathes it. 

There’s a dull flash of green light from below. Bubbles erupt as the surface grows choppy from the unseen action beneath it. Should Essek dive down? Or would he be adding to the problem as he did yesterday?

Veth is darting about on the surface of the water, firing crossbow bolts seemingly at random. She looks at Essek, eyes wide. “I can’t see shit down there!”

The water churns violently below him now, small splashes splattering on his boots when someone or something breaks the surface. He thinks he sees something; he releases a Sapping Sting. Veth fires again. 

Essek’s thoughts are racing too fast to make sense of them. There are pieces of the combat strategy talk Fjord had offered him in the night. _It’s about reading the battle and controlling the damage done to your people. Sometimes that means controlling where enemies are moving, sometimes it means maximizing your teammates’ efforts._ Then, helpfully, _like this funny thing my sword can do that puts glowy light stuff around the enemy so they’re easier targets, I should show you sometime_ ... a “funny thing” that Essek, like every young drow in Xhorhas, had known how to cast since he was barely old enough to speak its components, but never mind. 

He _could_ cast Faerie Fire. Would that even help the Nein here? He tries another Sapping Sting and he feels it connect with a target. The water ripples, and something floats at the surface for a few seconds: an eel, or something like it, but severely overgrown with fully realized limbs. It regains its composure and slaps its powerful tail against the water, shooting down into the murk once more. Beauregard breaches the surface, holding another one of these creatures in a headlock with her bo staff, then she, too, disappears below again. So, it’s a swarm then.

“What the fuck are these things?” Veth says, tracking a shape with her crossbow. She fires. “Fish-wolves? Are fish-wolves a thing?”

Essek closes his eyes and concentrates on the density and mass within the space below him, feeling for the resistance and motion of bodies against the water. The gravitational energy they exert outlines them in his mind’s eye, clearer than Faerie Fire could. The rippling, darting movements of the eelhounds’ long bodies make it easy to pick them out from his allies. He concentrates further. The dunamantic force takes hold upon the mass of their bodies, crushing them inwards, and their frenzy of motion comes to a pleasingly total stop. He feels a single eel creature struggle free of his radius of control; but if it leaves, that’s not his concern. 

Essek opens his eyes, holding the magic steady. Beauregard’s head breaks the surface, followed by Fjord and Jester. They look around, almost bewildered.

“They’re stuck!” Jester yells. “The eely things!”

“Essek!” Beauregard calls. “Did you do that?”

Essek nods. “I can’t hold them for long.”

Caleb breaks to the surface, his face set in determination. He looks quickly to Veth. Then he says, “Tell everyone to hitch a ride.”

He raises one arm above his head and begins casting, clutching some indeterminate component in his hand. Blood trickles down his exposed forearm, heavily diluted by the lake water. Essek isn’t sure whose blood it is. Then, Caleb’s arm begins to twist and deform. All of Caleb is rapidly changing into … something else. Polymorph, of course. In Caleb’s space there is now a huge water beast. The black and white markings identify it in Essek’s mind: an orca, impressively large and deadly in its own right. 

Veth starts running toward the whale. “Everybody climb on!”

Essek continues to hold his spell and glides closer to Caleb. He has no idea how this is supposed to work, especially with all of them; he suspects they don’t either. 

Fjord helps Caduceus reach for Caleb’s dorsal fin, then he turns and helps push Veth onto Caleb’s back as well. Caduceus wraps her in his long arms as they both sit astride the whale. Caduceus has a large wound on his leg that is bleeding freely. The duration of his spell is fast approaching now; Essek can feel his grip upon the eelhounds’ mass begin to fade. 

“Essek, come on!”

Jester grabs Essek’s hand and pulls him forcefully toward Caleb as the last of his control slips and he feels the remaining creatures dart towards them in wounded, furious motion. The surface of the water immediately surges. Beauregard yells and Yasha slashes at something with her great sword. Caleb clicks and screeches, almost impatiently. There is an eel latched onto his tail. _Sapping Sting_.

“Is that everyone?” Fjord shouts.

“Yes, let’s move!” Caduceus answers.

Caleb seems to understand and takes off at once. 

It’s chaos. Jester is holding Essek with one hand, now two. Fjord is holding her around the waist as he clings to Caleb’s pectoral fin. Essek’s face drags against the surface of the water, then pops back up, then crashes painfully into the surface again — and fine, he drops his hover spell. His body drops into the water and drags backwards, and he reaches for Jester, grabbing onto her forearm with his free arm as best he can. Dragging through the water like this is still somehow better than skimming the lake’s surface, face down at top speed. Then something bites into his leg. Essek yells out and nearly loses his grip on Jester’s arm.

A crossbow bolt streaks past his face; the creature releases his leg.

Panting, Essek chances a look behind them, but it’s hard to make out much of anything in the wake of the whale. It does seem as though the eel pack is falling behind them; the creature that bit him is now ten feet, twenty feet behind. A bolt of pink lightning streaks back and explodes in the water where the eels seem to be. Essek tries to face forward. He can only see Jester and Fjord as they strain to hold on. Water is slamming them all in turn as Caleb’s body contorts with each stroke of his tail.

The absolute power of this orca form is breathtaking. Polymorph has never been a focus of his before, but right now, as Caleb propels them all across dangerous waters at inhuman speeds, Essek sees the appeal. 

Caleb starts clicking and screeching again—Essek registers the temple is suddenly _right there_ —but before he can brace himself, the whale twists in the water and nearly slams into the stone ziggurat. Jester is already pulling him to the stone. Essek grabs at the wall and, limbs shaking, tries to pull himself up out of the water. His leg _hurts_ under his weight and the foot almost feels numb. He manages to scramble up anyhow. 

“Caleb, let’s go!” Jester calls. 

Essek looks: the Mighty Nein are all starting to climb the wall. Caduceus is struggling, more than Essek it looks like. Beauregard has several nasty gashes bleeding freely, big enough to see at a distance. 

Caleb the orca spins in the water as if he means to charge back at the eels, who are very definitely still pursuing, albeit currently at some distance. Essek pangs with alarm: does Caleb still even have his mind in this form?

“Caleb!” Veth cries. 

Caleb stops. Instead, the orca begins to shrink and shift until Caleb the human is treading water, long strands of wet hair stuck across his face. 

Fjord holds out a hand for him, and then Essek breathes again. He begins to climb. Essek is a fast learner, he always has been; and he’s learned that this group will be fine here, so long as they don’t have to drag him up the temple wall themselves. 

“They’re almost here! C’mon!” Beauregard calls, looking back towards the pack of eelhounds. 

“Keep climbing!” Fjord yells. 

Essek doesn’t look back. He keeps pushing, even when the pain in his leg shoots up through his hip every time he pushes off with that side. The muscles of his legs and arms are still shaky, his heart pounding in his throat. He grits his teeth together. He can do this. One stone step at a time. He can hear Yasha as she growls, feral and angry. He’s almost at the top. One more step. One more. 

Jester reaches the top, pulls herself up easily with her arms. “There’s a door!” she calls down. “There’s a door!”

Her face appears over the side of the top step, and she holds out an arm for Essek. They link forearms, and she pulls him up to the summit as if he weighs nothing. Veth scrambles over the top and immediately dives for the door. It jiggles when she pulls at it, but it doesn’t open. She starts pulling tools out from somewhere inside her vest and leans in, setting to work.

Beauregard shouts, “These dumb fuckers!”

Essek peers over the edge. The eel pack has reached the ziggurat and are also scaling the angled wall … and at a horribly fast pace, much faster than the Mighty Nein. Caleb and Fjord reach the summit first, but it won’t be long.

“Ha!” Veth crows. “Got it!” She flings the door open, a white feather already in her hand. What’s that she’s about to cast, Fly? Oh, Feather Fall: of course. Beauregard jumps straight down, and Fjord follows her with Jester and Caduceus when Yasha tells them _she’s got this_. No one has so much as looked down the trapdoor before leaping. 

Someone grabs Essek’s hand. It’s Caleb, a feather also in hand — and Essek follows as Caleb jumps.

_____________________

_____________________

One of the first things Beau notices, as she lands softly on her ass in a pile of her party members, is that Yasha has managed to pull the door shut behind them. She can hear the distant sounds of the fish monsters clawing and growling from outside the temple, and she breathes out.

“It’s a good job someone put a ladder here,” Yasha calls from up high.

Indeed, that is one of the other very first things Beau has noticed: the rope ladder tied and hung from the roof entrance. Yasha steadily climbs her way down. Beau laughs to herself, because she knows Yasha had been prepared to jump as well. Beau stands up and begins surveying the rest of this chamber.

“Oh my gosh, Beau! Here, let me heal you.”

“I’m fine,” Beau says, gently swatting away Jester’s hands.

It’s true, she’s a little beat up, but there are others who are worse off, and she doesn’t have time for it right now either. They raced their way into another temple of Uk’otoa, and until she’s satisfied that they’re not going to get gassed or exploded or whatever else she’s not going to sit and rest for a few fish bites.

“Beau,” Jester says flatly.

That stops her short.

Jester closes the distance once more and places her hands on Beau’s arm near a particularly deep wound. She closes her eyes and bites her lip. Jester always does a little scrunchy thing with her nose when she’s concentrating on a spell like this. The familiar warmth of healing spreads from Jester’s fingertips and into Beau’s arm. It’s always a weird sensation when the wound starts knitting together, but it’s not all bad. Beau looks away when Jester finishes the spell and opens her eyes.

“That’s a little better,” Jester says proudly.

“Thanks, Jes.”

Beau resumes her perimeter scan of the room. It’s a decently large room, and there is light inside that streaks from the few narrow slits built into the structure itself. For air? 

“ _Caduceus!_ ”

Beau glances over and sees Jessie fussing over Cad while he settles himself on the stone floor. Then she yanks a crossbow bolt from his shoulder and tosses it behind her. To his credit, he takes it in stride and continues setting up for a familiar healing ritual. Beau can see why he’s planning a big heal: a lot of them are fairly beat up from their little swim across the lake.

While Caduceus gets going on his prayer ritual, Beau presses her sash over a large gash on her stomach and takes a walk around the chamber. It’s clean, she notices that for a start. It’s in regular use. The Ki’Nau people who row out to the temple must perform their purification ritual here. There’s no sign of a doorway, a hatch, stairs: no access down to any other part of the temple. It’s gotta be here, though. What they’ve seen of this temple looks similar in architecture to the pyramid temple on Urukayxl, and this chamber is the same narrow pentagram shape as the top chamber there. Back before the temple was flooded, this would have been the top floor; the holiest of holies, maybe. You wouldn’t have been meant to enter from this floor back then. 

This place looks far more intact than either of the other temples to Uk’otoa. The walls and floor are lined with simple, repeating motifs carved into the stone: a rippling snake shape with eye-shaped concave depressions set into it at regular intervals. 

There’s a stone dais at the very center that holds a large, round brazier. She runs her finger over it experimentally. Iron, maybe? It doesn't seem nearly as old as it should be; did someone add it here later? Or has someone been maintaining it? She pushes it with her boot and it doesn’t budge, which is curious. It’s not _that_ large.

The floor around the dais piques her interest, too: the stone tiles are carved with looping abstract patterns that are different from the rest of the room. She stares at them, trying to see if she can see any writing, pictures, anything meaningful. She taps a few tiles carefully with her foot. Nothing happens. She looks around the walls, investigates the stones carefully for anything different or out of place, or a secret lever maybe. She finds nothing on her first pass.

“So the first temple,” Caleb is saying to Essek, “had been reclaimed by the yuan-ti people for Zehir.” Essek nods and makes an _mmhmm_ noise. They’re both acting like they’re the only two people in the room. “We went in from the top there, too, and there was a blood sacrifice table which drained into—” 

“Hey, Caleb,” Beau says. “This floor got any magic going on?”

Caleb glances to Caduceus, who’s still deep in prayer, and raises a finger. “One moment.” 

Essek touches Caleb’s shoulder, and without saying another word, mutters some arcane gibberish and flicks out a gesture with his fingertips. He clicks his tongue. “Abjuration magic,” he says. He frowns, turns to Caleb. “And, yes, small amounts of transmutation. A basic arcane lock, I should think.”

“If it’s anything like the other temples, probably not so basic,” Caleb says. 

“It’s supposed to be a thing you can work out, though,” Beau cuts in. Why does she have to cut in? This is her and Caleb’s thing. “Uk’otoa wants the worthy to be able to get where they need.”

Caleb opens his mouth, but then the whole conversation stops for a moment. Caduceus’ ritual has completed, and a soft ring of green light ripples out from him, across the group, through the room. Beau exhales slowly and lets the healing prayer do its thing, sewing the edges of her other cuts and scrapes back together. 

At her feet, the green light is seeping into the grooves of the tiles. She exclaims and dances back, then watches with everyone else as a particular few of the loops and lines light up. The green glow intensifies. 

A circle of rings glow green on the floor. She counts them: nine in total. Within each ring is a different, swirling symbol. 

“Now that’s something,” Caleb says as he crouches to the glowing symbol closest to him. “Here’s our way in, I think.”

“So is this how we open the portal or whatever to get to Uk’otoa?” Veth asks. “Do we _want_ to open it? Or…?”

“I dunno,” Beau says; and she means it. There’s more to this than they know right now. “We’re great improvisers,” she says to Essek. “It’s like our thing.” Somehow, she feels like she needs to appear on top of this situation, and that she needs him to have no doubts about it. She’s not going to dig into that right now.

Essek flicks his eyes up from the tiles. “I’ve noticed,” he says, lips twitching. 

“Yeah, we should tell you the story of how we got our ship sometime,” Caduceus adds. Fjord groans loudly at that. 

“So what _exactly_ popped up as abjuration magic-y?” Beau asks. “The tiles or this thing in the middle,” she points to the dais and brazier, “or...?”

“All of it,” Essek says, waving a hand.

“Is this some kind of writing?” Beau asks Caleb. “I don’t recognise it.”

“Well,” he says, “let’s see.” He reaches down into the component pouch at his hip, then mutters a few words under his breath. He gently touches his fingers to the glowing symbol. “Ah,” he says. “It isn’t. Well, not language, at least.”

“So,” Essek says. “It took divine magic specifically to activate this lock. Perhaps, given this is a temple, the intent is that a cleric must be present. And then to unlock it?”

“Pact magic?” Caleb says. “That would make some sense, given the history of pacts with this entity.”

“Should I give it a little Eldritch Blast?” Fjord asks earnestly. 

Essek is hovering over the tiles, ankles crossed and hand on his chin. “Perhaps. Or we could try simply switching it off?” He mutters a brief incantation and spreads a hand out over the tiles. 

The green glow lighting up the symbols flares for a moment, then gutters out. Nothing else moves. Everyone stares. 

“Well,” Yasha says, “I don’t think that worked.”

_____________________

This is completely, utterly mortifying. Essek can feel the blood rushing to his cheeks and the tips of his ears. He’s always counted himself lucky that he’s dark enough that his flushes hardly show.

Dispelling the magic seemed like such a neat solution — but now he has not only made a mistake in public, he has wasted magical energy that will also cause _more_ to be wasted correcting his mistake. He’s noticed how careful Caleb and some of the others are about conserving resources, and he was attempting to show he could avoid being wasteful. Clearly, that attempt has been a failure.

“It was a good thought,” Caleb says. He reaches out, grins, and ruffles Essek’s hair. Essek flinches before he can stop himself; his skin is crawling with embarrassment.

Essek wishes he could take this inane puzzle box of a lock back to his laboratory so that he could work it out—surely quickly—in privacy and peace, then present the solution without the stupidity.

“Hey,” Beauregard calls. “Check out this brazier.”

Caleb gives Essek a quick earnest look, and Essek nods and makes a brushing gesture: _no, no, go on_. Caleb turns and goes to Beauregard by the stone dais. She points out some detail to Caleb that he bends down in order to take a closer look at. Essek can’t seem to make out their words over the ringing in his ears. He floats backwards a little way and lands on his feet.

The worst thing is perhaps how _quickly_ his failure has been forgotten. He ought to return to Caleb and Beauregard, who have not suggested they don’t want to hear more from him. He is being irrational. He knows that in private, a failed attempt or two would be nothing at all; but he is in public, in front of these, his friends, and in the first precarious days of several undertakings. The last thing he wants is to appear unreliable.

As he steps backwards, a hand touches his elbow. “Hey,” Jester says, taking his arm without asking. “How’s the floor puzzle going?”

“Ah,” Essek says, attempting composure. “Not so great.” He sees the paintbrush she’s holding. “You’re making something with your paints?”

“Oh no,” Jester says, “I was just drawing.”

She points with her toe at a floor tile now decorated with dark green ink. There is a rather crude, though well-rendered design depicting a phallic serpent with many, many butts.

“I see,” he replies. “It’s … very strikingly composed.” Which is the truth. The subject matter is puerile, but the lines of the drawing are deft and lively, the composition pleasing. “Any particular reason?”

Jester tilts her head. “People get _so serious_ about religion and _worship_ , and I think, you know, that it’s important to have some fun. The Traveler always says to make the world more fun.” She nudges his hip with hers, offers him a wide grin. “If your religion doesn’t make you happy, what’s the point?”

“And doing this is your … religious practice?”

“Kind of, yeah!” Jester says, releasing Essek to kneel next to her artistry. “I think I’m gonna add some poop.”

Essek bursts out laughing—quite despite himself. He has spent months carefully avoiding getting sucked too far into Jester’s nonsense. He’s not sure why this moment has broken him. It seems he’s reached his end.

“Jester,” Beauregard calls, “can you shoot some cleric magic over here?”

“A ranged healing spell of a higher level, I should think,” Caleb specifies.

Jester turns from where she’s focussing intently. “Is everyone okay?”

“Oh yeah; they’re fine,” Caduceus supplies. “But a touch spell didn’t do the trick with the floor.”

Jester pops up, her tail swishing happily, and she points a finger toward the center of the room. “Skinkidoody!”

A little zap of pink light hits Beauregard’s knee, sinking into a scrape there. The light spreads from the toe of Beauregard’s boot to the tiles, lighting them up once more, this time in glowing, warm pink.

“Dope,” Beauregard says. “Thanks, Jes.”

Jester turns back to Essek and winks before returning to her masterpiece. Essek is briefly torn on whether to observe her work or to rejoin the puzzle in the room, but Caleb is calling him by name and it would be even more obvious if Essek ignored them rather than risk further mistakes, further embarrassment. He floats his way to Caleb and Beauregard, taking a steadying breath as he goes.

Beauregard is crouched over one of the glowing symbols. Caleb peers over her shoulder, chin in hand as he, too, investigates the glowing tile. “Hey,” she says after a few moments. “This looks like the sigil for Torog.”

“I was thinking that exactly,” Caleb says. They look at each other and grin. There is something practiced and easy about it; it makes Essek feel once again that he doesn’t have a space here. He shakes it off.

“The Betrayer God?” Essek asks. He moves over to the symbol, peering curiously: three strokes curve out from a ring, ending in claw-like forks, like fingers. Something sparks in his memory.

“And this, this one I think is Zehir,” Caleb says, pointing to another circle. This one depicts a stylised cobra head.

“Asmodeus!” Beauregard adds, pointing at a circle on the other side with a pair of curling horns inside. She walks around the circle’s edge, peering at the other circles.

Caleb is counting in Zemnian under his breath. “ _Seiben, acht, neun_ —so, we have the nine betrayer gods?”

“Are there nine Betrayer Gods, though?” Beauregard asks, counting silently on her fingers. “I’m getting eight.”

Caleb stands. “Well, I suppose it depends on which texts you consider. There were the eight Betrayer Gods sealed after the Calamity, but there is also, in more recent history, the archlich Vecna who sought his own ascension.”

Beauregard shakes her head. “I’ve read about that. Those Tal’Dorei guys, Vox Machina, was that it? Yeah. They stopped him from reaching godhood. Banished him and the whole thing.”

“They did stop the ascension, for a time.” Caleb continues. “But there are other texts that suggest he was successfully ascended by cultists before they banished him.”

“So which one is which?” Fjord asks. “Which tile is Vecna, if he’s number nine?”

“I’m not sure,” Beauregard replies. She crouches next to a different tile, carefully traces her finger in the air over the lines. Essek is thoroughly impressed with Beauregard’s level of history reading. It’s unexpected, but perhaps that’s part of the design. Essek is all too familiar with masks.

Caleb is crouching over a different tile himself, his expression stern. “I’m not convinced these are all gods, Beauregard.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right. There’s the old snea snake,” she says, pointing at a circle containing a looping serpent with many, many eyes. “And we all know he’s no god.”

“What about this bird?” Fjord asks. “Didn’t we see one like it at the other temple? Three eyes?”

“Desirat,” Caleb says. “Which means this one here must be Quajath, the third champion we’ve seen depicted before.”

“So who the hell is this one?” Beauregard asks gruffly, jabbing at another lighted tile with a disgusted gesture. “And what do we do with them all?”

Essek steps closer to the tile and peers at it. It’s almost abstract, but something looks familiar about the image. Two crossed lines at the outer edge, and above them three curved shapes rising to points. “Fire,” he says, nearly a whisper.

“Ah?” Caleb looks over, frowning at the tile. “Yes, yes, it is.”

“Okay,” Beauregard says. “So we’ve got three of the Betrayer Gods. We got three champions, and yeah, that’s definitely a fire. And, these other two. Wait, that’s water.” She grins, then points. “Totally. Right? Look at it.”

“Elements?” Caleb says.

“The primordial titans,” Essek says. It flashed to his mind with that pleasing mental click of a puzzle piece sliding into place. Many people are looking at him, most of them somewhat confused. “Before the prime deities, there were the titans.” He spreads his hands. Mythology fascinates him; when it shades into the history of religion it becomes far less appealing. His knowledge is partial, but this is basic information. “So the story goes, they first inhabited the Material Plane. The gods, the Prime Deities, defeated them in order for civilization to flourish. These titans were elemental in nature.”

“Huh”, Beauregard says.

Essek points. “Beauregard, that symbol is in fact, I think, the earth titan. It’s usually a representation of a tilled field.” He points to the final sigil, a curling wave. “This one is water.”

“ _Huh_ ,” Beauregard repeats.

“So, three sets of three?” Caleb looks earnestly between Essek, Beauregard and the tiles. Essek’s mood settles, just a little.

There is a loud scraping noise. They all look up to see Caduceus has pressed the bottom of his staff into one of the tiles, which has now sunk a few inches into the floor.

“Well, that’s something,” the firbolg says. He removes his staff from the stone tile, and it slowly pops back up into place. There are no other apparent changes.

“Maybe we have to press them in some sort of order,” Veth says. “Like, alphabetically? Or in order of, I dunno, how powerful they are? Anyone have any guesses?”

Essek’s feet lift from the floor as he leans in over the titles. “The gods existed before their champions,” he says. The words come to him as he speaks. “And the titans existed before the gods.”

Beauregard flicks a look at Essek, puts out her lower lip, nods. It’s an acknowledgement of some sort. “You know which titan came first?”

Essek drifts back from the tiles and lets his feet land on the ground again. “The titans supposedly existed before creation,” he says. “I’m aware of no order, but then again this is not my area.”

“Earth, Fire, Water,” Veth says. “We could do it alphabetically anyway?” She shrugs.

“Okay, I’m trying the earth titan … now.” Beauregard steps experimentally on the floor tile, and it sinks down. She steps off and it rises back into place.

Caleb steps down on the water tile, then steps off it and watches it, similarly, rise once more into place. He moves over to the fire tile, steps a foot onto it. The tile rises again as soon as he lifts his foot. “Ah,” he says. “Perhaps we could work out the order through trial and error.”

Beauregard is frowning. “Okay. Wait. I wanna try something. I’m gonna push down the water titan tile. Caleb, try standing on the earth titan at the same time I’m doing it. Veth, you try the fire titan.”

Veth and Caleb both grin immediately, appreciatively. Essek feels his excitement rise in his chest and he covers his mouth with his hand, the other arm crossed in front of his chest.

Beauregard counts them all down: three, two, one. This time, when all three titan tiles are stood upon, there is an audible click. Essek is hovering closer before he even realises. There is a brief moment where everyone glances at each other, various levels of excitement and anxiety apparent, and when the players step off, the tiles stay locked into their depressed position.

“Ah! It’s a tile matching puzzle!” Essek says, more exuberantly than he’d meant. He is Essek of Den Thelyss, Shadowhand to the Bright Queen, dunamis prodigy and the creator of multiple new and sought-after spells. This puzzle is no more complicated than the games he’d played as a child; but somehow, in this moment, this discovery is more sensational.

“Beauregard, please stand on Zehir,” Caleb says as he moves to stand in front of the tiles for Torog. Caleb does nothing to hide his own smile. “And Veth, please take Asmodeus, if you would.”

Again, when all three tiles are fully depressed, there is a loud click; and they all stay in place when the players step off. Immediately, and without words, they arrange themselves around the last three tiles and look to each other expectantly. Fjord and the others are at the ready, and it occurs to Essek that he should be too, though the thrill of piecing together this mystery is hard to push down.

As they stand down on the final three tiles, there is the familiar click as they lock into place, but there is also now a loud grinding. The floor reverberates gently, and in the center of the room, the stone dais is sprouting a stone pedestal that slowly lifts the iron brazier as it pushes up and out. The pedestal is carved with long, twisting grooves that snake along the full length of the pedestal.

“Fjord,” Caleb says with a grin, “here is your red button.”

“What?” Fjord furrows his brows, and then his epiphany is plain to see. “On it!”

Fjord summons eldritch energy into his palm and hurls it toward the brazier. It takes hold, the deep green energy crackling almost like a flame, spreading down into the pedestal grooves and lighting the room faintly.

There is another rumbling; the floor nearest the dais, inside the circle of glowing tiles, a panel of the stone floor slides open to reveal a stone staircase leading down. It’s more satisfactory than Essek would dare to admit.


	2. Chapter 2

As the gentle glow of the floor runes fades, so does Essek’s reckless excitement; he carefully schools his expression to something more neutral as he lets his hover fade. He steps across to the staircase leading down from the open floor panel, into darkness. The steps are worn concave in the middle from long use.

Around him, the Mighty Nein are gathering themselves and readying to descend the spiral staircase. Essek wonders if the puzzle-locks increase in difficulty on each floor? Or perhaps they become more tailored tests of Uk’otoa’s followers’ worthiness to succeed? He steps carefully onto the first step—and a heavy hand lands on his shoulder.

“Skinny wizards in the middle,” Yasha says evenly. She points behind herself with a finger. “Unless you’d like to be the bait?”

Essek tilts his head in acknowledgement. “I would rather not, thank you. Please, do go and take the lead if you would prefer.”

Yasha grins at him sharply. “I always do.”

Essek resists the urge to glide as he heads back towards where Caleb and Veth are bringing up the middle. “This is exciting,” Caleb says.

“Oh yeah,” Veth says, unenthused.

“The abjuration trigger on that lock had some interesting features,” Caleb says as they start down the stairs. He slips a hand to the pouch at his hip, then gestures and floats a neat string of Dancing Lights ahead of them all. “Designed to need at least three people, and both divine magic and pact magic. It makes me wonder what may lie ahead.”

“I was also curious about the mechanism for the physical movement,” Essek says. “Basic, but the technique looked to have some quirks. The older non-dunamantic gravity magics do everything inefficiently, but occasionally in the most interesting ways.”

“Well,” Caleb says, “if you liked that game, I think you would very much enjoy the Happy Fun Ball we told you of before. Halas’ work is astonishing, and to be standing within the mazes of a mind like that—”

“It really was amazing,” Veth says flatly. “There was a blue dragon, and it tried to eat us all, that was an experience. And then this other time we were in there: I died. _That_ was fun.”

“Well, I did not mean that part,” Caleb says. His voice has softened. “Veth—”

“It’s fine, I’m fine—” Then her foot slips, and she squeaks and clutches at Caleb, who pitches forward and grabs at Essek’s shoulder as he goes. With a jab of shock, Essek braces himself for them to tumble down the staircase in a chain of lost dignity—but Veth somehow manages to catch herself, and Caleb to right himself against the wall.

“Careful,” Yasha calls from up ahead. “The stairs down here are slippy.”

“We must be below the water line now,” Beauregard says. “The walls are damp.”

They reach the bottom of the staircase soon after. Essek sees those ahead of him stepping down a short corridor which leads to an archway. Essek feels another little kick of excitement in his chest.

Caduceus points his lighted staff into the chamber, and then they head in one by one.

This chamber is plainer than the last, and even damper than the stairs. When Caleb’s lights hover close, the walls around them shine slick with reflection. The air has the same rank, rotting plant matter smell as the lake itself.

Essek picks his way towards the center of the room, where Beauregard and Caduceus are already looking around with curiosity. The floor is slimy with algae, but he commits to walking in it. He’s already come this far.

“Weird that this chamber’s full of air,” Beauregard says. “We’re far down enough now you’d think it’d be flooded.”

“You think there’s another floor puzzle?” Veth asks. They’re all of them in the middle of the chamber now. She crouches, wipes away some of the algae from the floor tile in front of her. She makes a surprised noise—Essek tilts his head, curious—and then she is frantically yanking back her arm, grabbing for the sword at her hip with her other hand. “Shit! Shit!”

A long tendril of gray slime is wrapping like a snake around Veth’s arm. She wrenches it away, hissing, but even as she does so, another two tendrils grab at her legs. Beauregard sweeps her staff back and forth around Veth’s ankles—Veth pulls a face and holds still—and the slime drips away, inert.

An ooze. Ugh. Here is another unwanted first. He’s familiar with these things, but, happily, has never had cause to encounter one ... until today. It was indistinguishable from the rest of the wet, slimy floor they’ve been picking their way across. Everyone is looking around them carefully, now. Caduceus lowers his staff to shine a light closer to the damp stone under their feet. What was it Essek’s little brother and his army friends used to say about ooze? Where there’s one, there’s always more?

“Aw, fuck,” Fjord says.

The entire floor is moving — and the walls. Well, but of course this would have to happen. As Essek watches, the slimy damp that covers the stone interior creeps down and inwards, towards all of them as they stand in the center of the chamber. They’re ankle deep in it in moments. Essek reflexively rises to a hover, or tries to. A long tendril slaps at his leg, wrapping around his knee—the touch burns, and its grasp tightens with bruising force—he flicks out a Sapping Sting and the tendril writhes and contracts, its externalities starting to liquify. It’s like pouring salt on a slug. Rosohna’s climate is cool and damp, and Essek has too many childhood memories of treading on slugs with a bare foot, when they crept onto the tiles of the kitchen floor in the night. These things are significantly more disgusting.

Fjord is hacking at a tendril of ooze that is grasping his shield arm; Beauregard’s fists are punching one-two, almost too fast to see. Veth levitates, legs kicked high, and fires a crossbow bolt into the pond of ooze that explodes on impact, spraying everyone nearby with burnt-smelling slime.

Caleb flashes out a fire spell that flares up in an intricate web; Jester manifests a huge spectral, glowing lollipop that slams downwards into the pond of lashing slime. The ooze is lashing up in tentacles everywhere. Slime is spraying; people are yelling. Essek hovers a little higher, then pushes more velocity into one of Yasha’s brutal downward greatsword sweeps. The ooze cleaves in two—and each half rolls in opposite directions, still writhing and extending pseudopods. Of course, these things survive when cut into two—but as he watches, the tendrils reaching for him and for Yasha curl back into themselves, and both halves of the ooze contract and fall inert.

The next minute or so is extremely messy.

_____________________

“Essek … do the thing,” Beau shouts as she holds her arms out in front of herself, dull gray slick dripping off of her bracers in thick splotches.

“I’m happy to have my arcane talents engaged for basic cleaning services,” Essek says, as he saunters in her direction.

“You know it’s gross, man, come on. You magicked yourself clean like, immediately.”

“Very well,” Essek replies with relish, tracing his fingers through the air with pointed precision. “I shall add this to your bill.”

“He’s enjoying this,” Caduceus says to himself. No one is near enough to hear him, but it wouldn't have mattered if they did; it’s a true statement, and one Caduceus was glad to make.

It’s good that Essek is starting to find a space in the group. He’s been on the outside for months, but even more painfully so the last week or two. Caduceus has been hoping the others would all give him the opportunity to be better; most of them have, and it’s especially nice to see Beau a little less hostile. Sometimes the best way to learn is to lead by example, and now the Mighty Nein definitely has someone to set an example for.

Beau closes her eyes as Essek casts Prestidigitation once more. Caduceus turns and sees Jester taking care of Caleb, fussing over a nasty ooze swipe on his calf. That’s good. Caleb needs to know the group still has his back, too.

“How ya doing, Deuce?” Fjord asks. He’s been furiously trying for the past few minutes to clean the sludge from his shield, but it’s clear the damage is deeper than the surface.

Caduceus places his hand on Fjord’s shoulder. “Oh, I’m all right,” he answers. Unlike Fjord and some of the others, his own gear seems none worse for the wear. “I think everyone’s maybe a little tired. I’m going to make some tea.”

He knows by now that it’s best not to argue with some of these fools and to simply … lead by example. The creatures they’d just fought weren’t terribly threatening other than by number, and he was pretty sure all the Mighty Nein really needed was to catch their breath before purposefully seeking out the next challenge. Convincing all of them with words would be futile, though—and really, he could do with a cup of tea himself.

As he settles himself on the damp stone floor, he watches Essek clean Yasha’s gear with trepidation. Yasha is more like Essek than either of them probably realize. He wonders how long it will take for the two of them to figure that out.

Fjord sits nearby. “Tea sounds great.” He lays his shield out next to Caduceus’ and the corrosive damage to Fjord’s is even more apparent — but Fjord stops fussing with it.

“I was thinking after tea that I might talk to the Wildmother for a few. This place just feels … dark.”

“I know what you mean,” Fjord answers with a resigned sigh. It feels really good, Caduceus thinks, to be walking the same path with someone. To catch up to each other.

It takes a few tries to get the fire started, but once the kettle is on, Caduceus relaxes. He still keeps a sharp ear open, though. Beau laughs loudly and slaps her knee. She’s now sitting with Veth and Yasha, and entertained by her own joke, it seems. Yasha is grinning in her reserved way. Veth is also laughing, but there’s a look in her eyes. He worries for Veth. She’s been a very troubled person the whole time he’s known her. He’s never known what to do about it; her sort of trouble is messy and mostly beyond his understanding. Lately, it’s seemed to shift to a different sort of mess, which Caduceus still has no idea how to handle. She’s not drinking now, though. That’s a step; and he sees it’s a struggle, especially as the stuff that’s eating her up inside isn’t going anywhere. He’ll keep an eye on her. Everyone will, but he’ll keep an eye out.

“Fjord, Caduceus!” Jester sings.

“Hey, Jester,” Fjord says.

“Hey,” Caduceus echoes. “How’d you fare?”

“Oh I’m all right, quite fine!” She settles herself on the floor across the fire and lays her shield next to their growing pile. Caduceus notes the damage on hers where the oozes had made contact. “I was just checking on everyone and they’re all fine, too. Just slime everywhere. All slimy. Essek’s fixing it up, though.” She swivels her head round and yells. “ _Hey, Essek!_ You know how you just got all the slime off of you, and then off of Beau, and now you’re getting it off of Caleb?”

“Yes,” Essek says as he finishes his current casting. “I know that very well.”

“Could you, like, do it some more? For us too?”

He pretends not to hear her at first —Jester’s tail twitches impatiently—but after a moment, Essek walks over to them, feet on the ground once more, miming resignation.

“ _Thank you, Essek_ ,” Jester says. “It’s such a super useful spell.”

“Yes,” Essek says, moving on to lay a hand on Fjord’s shoulder. “So very useful that it is the first arcane practice we teach to children.”

“Children make a lot of mess,” Jester says. “Or maybe just me? I feel like maybe you didn’t make any mess, ever, Essek?”

Essek tilts his chin at her. “Not particularly,” he replies, still refusing to let on that he’s pleased. He reaches a hand out to Caduceus.

“Just the slime,” Caduceus says, holding up a finger. “Not these guys.” He gestures to the precious lichen blooming on his armor and shield. Caduceus thinks for a moment. Also his hair, his staff. “Just the slime, thanks.” He’s seen Essek’s version of clean; it’s maybe a little too clean for him, personally.

“Thank you,” Fjord says with a kind smile.

“Thank you, thank you,” Jester says again, leaning in to Essek as he casts.

“I shall add it to your bill,” Essek says, repeating the joke to a new audience.

“Do we owe a lot?” Jester says. “You want a donut? I have a donut in my bag, I think. It’s still good. No, wait. I ate it.”

“Ah, well,” Essek says. “Never mind.” His voice is light and sardonic, but the little smile twitching up the corners of his mouth seems entirely involuntary. Caduceus notices him taking particular care to clean every particle of slime off Jester’s hair and her decorated horns.

“There’s going to be tea, though,” Caduceus offers. “Would you like a cup?”

“You’re making us tea?” Jester beams at him.

“I am. I was thinking today we might enjoy some of the Klossowski line.”

“Mmm.” Her tail curls up from the floor to sway back and forth, “that sounds like a really fancy tea.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Tea would be lovely,” Essek says. “Please let me know when it is ready.” He excuses himself with a short bow and heads back to Caleb, who has made himself comfortable on the floor a few feet away.

“Hey, Fjord?” Jester asks. “Do you want me to try Mending your shield?”

“You think that would work?” Fjord is already handing her the shield, though.

She takes it into her lap gingerly. “I’m very good at Mending things.”

Caduceus is curious to see whether it works. Sometimes things like this need stronger magics to fix, and he’s not sure a lightly battered shield is worth such a spell. With deft hands, Jester begins casting Mending, and it does, in fact, begin reforming a small section of the damage. Very nice.

Caduceus insteads turns his attention to his pouches and begins sifting through the various cloths and parchments within. Spices, dried herbs, various fungi: he’s been well stocked for most of this journey, has made it a point to be so. Ah, here they are. He withdraws the collection of glass jars containing the teas he’s dried himself, smelling the seam by the lid to find the right one.

“So Caleb seems really happy, don’t you think?” Jester asks.

“Well, I mean, it’s no surprise, now, is it?” Caduceus answers, adding tea to the kettle and setting it aside. “He’s made a choice to be happy. Good for him.”

Caleb has cared deeply for Essek for a while now, and the other way round. Of course, the situation was tricky before. They had to dance around it for some time, deny it to themselves even. It's still tricky now. There’s a reason Caduceus always vows to be honest: it makes life less complicated. He can think of few things more miserable than denying your own heart. It's baffling how many people seem to do that to themselves.

“What are we talking about?” Fjord asks. He’s absently running his fingers over the freshly Mended shield Jester has handed him.

Jester giggles and glances between Caduceus and the wizards as they quietly discuss the obsidian in Essek’s palm. “Oh, you _know_.” She wiggles her eyebrows.

Fjord looks to Caduceus. Caduceus nods his head toward the wizards, and Fjord turns that way. Caduceus grins as Fjord finds his place in the current conversation.

“Ah, well I hope it works out for them. For Caleb.”

Jester tilts her head. “Why wouldn’t it work out, Fjord?”

“Essek made a lot of bad choices in the past,” Caduceus says seriously. “I think there are a good number of folks out there who don’t wish him well.” He gently pats Jester’s forearm. “It’s complicated. He’s taking steps in the right direction, but he needs to be careful that he stays focussed on where he’s stepping right now, that he doesn’t find his way back to darker paths.”

Fjord nods. He gets it. “Well, if he truly plans to do good, I would like to help him.”

Caduceus beams. “I would as well.”

As Jester continues on, Caduceus closes his eyes and inhales the fragrant steam, berry sweet. He begins pulling cups from his bag and setting them on the floor. The road ahead is long and cloaked in shadow, but he _knows_ , more deeply and fully than ever, that they are walking the right path. This group, all of them together, is moving towards a destiny. He might not know what that is yet, but that doesn’t matter. He’ll know when he needs to know. The important thing is that they’re together and headed in the right direction. He has faith in that.

“Okay, everyone!” Jester calls. “Come and get your _tea_!”

_____________________

_____________________

Caleb pats a hand over the contents of his pack in the usual order. His books in amber are there, his component pouch at his hip, the amulets beneath his shirt. Everything is in its place.

This floor had, it turns out, no puzzle: or perhaps one which broke a long time ago. The stairway down is open; a tile that may once have covered it lies cracked in pieces nearby.

As everyone gears up, Fjord is investigating the stairs. “It’s flooded,” he says. It is. The waterline starts only a few steps down. Fjord dips a boot below the water. “The stairs seem to go down, but we’ll be swimming long before we reach the bottom.”

Caleb looks automatically to Veth, who is standing over with Beauregard and Yasha. He catches Veth look down. Her hand drops to her hip where her flask used to sit, and she fiddles with the empty catches of her belt, then toys with one of her button bracelets.

“Veth?” Caleb says. “Could you come here for a moment?”

“Sure,” she says. She picks her way across the room, deftly avoiding the now dormant ooze puddles. He’s struck by how her body language hasn’t entirely lost that light, wary quality it always had when she was a goblin, like a rabbit ready to bolt at the snap of a twig.

“Hello,” Caleb says. She raises her eyebrows. “I know that,” Caleb starts, and then stops. “I know that … we haven’t had a chance to talk about things, things in general, you, and me; and I know that now is not the best time either. But, well, how are you doing?”

“Great,” Veth says. She’s not looking him in the eye. “I mean, awesome. Fantastic.”

“Veth.” He crouches so that they’re eye to eye, and waits.

She notices, but she doesn’t hold his gaze. “Fine. This isn’t great, but there are bigger fish to fry. Maybe literally, I don’t know.”

“I know this isn’t fun for you. We’re here for Fjord, but…”

“Most of us are,” she cuts in, glancing over to Essek. He’s off on the other side of the room listening to Caduceus talk about something. “I think someone over there may be here for you.”

“Yes,” Caleb says. “That is a—thing. That is happening.” His cheeks are heating up. “I was asking about you, Veth.”

“Me?” She spreads her hands. “I told you, I’m fine. My problems are all solved now, right? I’m—”

Caleb catches her forearm gently. “Things are rarely that simple. You and I both know that. And you and I—are you and I, still. There is so much right now going on. And so much that is new for you, and for me.” She’s stopped now, and is looking at him, listening. He feels like they understand each other. Sometimes they understand each other, he thinks, better than anyone in the world could. “I am here,” he says.

“I’m here too,” Veth says. She takes his hand and squeezes it. They both smile.

Caleb reaches to his pouch. “Here,” he says, and places the pearl to her forehead, and tugs the threads of possibility towards her. The dunamantic energy swirls for a moment around Veth’s head, a fractal halo of rainbow-tinged white light. Then it sinks in and is part of her.

Caduceus lights his staff. Yasha takes a spot next to him in line.

“Veth,” Caleb says softly, “I may not be able to keep lights going underwater if things get hairy. Stick to Caduceus if that should happen.”

“Yeah,” she says, “Got it.”

He sighs and casts Dancing Lights as one by one, their group starts down the staircase. Caleb has his Transmuter Stone to see in the dark, Beauregard has her goggles, Caduceus has his staff. Veth has the lights. All of these are fallible. He’ll try to help them see for as long as he can manage.

They step into the cold water, and it laps up around them as they go down. Veth has determinedly kept the spot ahead of him. He touches a hand to her shoulder as she goes. A moment later, he feels her take her first breath of water as his string of lights, too, dip below.

Caleb ducks his head and takes his first thick breath of water—and finds that this isn’t the brackish water of the lake: they are in saltwater now. It’s curious, and an ominous reminder of the hydra’s well in Urukayxl. Moments later, the stairs abruptly end, giving way to a ruined gap that leads into dark, open water. He sees those ahead kicking off into it.

They swim together, down into the dark. They lose sight of the walls, and the stairs above. Even with the vision the transmuter stone grants him, he can make out nothing beyond their group. It seems impossibly vast down here. The lights worry him, actually. They are a slow-moving target, glowing in the abyss.

Veth is swimming furiously to keep up with the group. They have to slow down for her, and they do. It’s better to be cautious anyway. No one’s saying it, but they all expect something to happen, something to spring itself upon them like that night on the ship.

They swim lower and lower, maintaining stealth as best they can with the lights going. There’s pressure on his ears; Caleb pinches his nose and equalises, releasing some of the excess air. He sees Jester tapping Essek on the wrist and miming to him how to do the same thing. She’s taken charge of making sure he’s all right, and Essek is nodding seriously, taking her instructions. The whole thing is so completely charming that for a moment, Caleb almost forgets that they are all swimming in an ominous and inky void towards a dangerous destination.

_Ah._

What? The exclamation boomed out of nowhere, painfully loud, and he grabs his ears to shield it.

_What has wandered into my keep?_

Except that the voice is echoing inside his head; he knows as soon as his hands do nothing to dull the words as they grate at his calm. Here, here it is: the trouble they knew would be down here.

 _I grow tired of eel flesh …_ The voice is velvety, but it rings so painfully in his mind. He winces. _What sweet meal has presented itself to me?_

He glances at his party: half of them are covering their ears, all of them are looking furiously in all directions. There is something out there, something intelligent. Something dangerous, and none of them seem to have a clue what. Their little group is contracting, drifting closer. Caleb grips Veth’s forearm as he swims closer to Jester and Essek.

”And whose keep would this be?” Caleb answers aloud.

He sees nothing, even with his magically enhanced sight. He glances at Essek, who grew up in eternal night. Essek, next to him now, looks back with fear in his eyes — and then his face shutters down and the fear is gone. The Shadowhand is now present, full of fierce disinterest.

_Ah, it speaks. Very well, it’s been far too long since I’ve enjoyed civilised conversation. Far too long._

Caleb swivels his head, but there is nothing there. Only darkness.

“Hello!” Jester peeps. “Hello?”

_I am Siedaes, Keeper of the Abyss. To whom do I owe this … pleasure?_

“ _Interesting_ ,” Essek says, drawing out the word. His chin is lifted and his voice is ringing out into the dark, cool and superior, with the smallest hint of contempt. “We are a group of individuals with business in this temple. It seems you have some intelligence, yes? What manner of creature are you?”

The voice chuckles. Caleb winces, and puts a warning hand on Essek’s arm. Essek catches Caleb’s eye and flaps a hand at him slightly: _don’t worry, I’ve got this._ Caleb is doubtful in the extreme that he has got this.

Essek addresses the voice. “A little more politeness would be advised. I assume you would like to keep your life?”

“How do you say your name?” Fjord cuts in. “Seedas, am I getting that right? Could you perhaps spell it for me?”

“Sid-ay-us?” Beau tries.

“Seedy?” Jester says. “Hi, Seedy! I’m Jester. So, we are here to check out the temple, okay? And we would really, really appreciate if maybe you could just let us hang out for, oh, I don’t know. Really not long.”

“Yes,” Fjord cuts in. “See-day-us?”

“Seedy,” Caduceus says.

“Si-days?” Fjord tries. “Are you the guardian of this temple? We are followers of Uk’otoa, humbly seeking access to the, uh, holy relic?”

 _This place belongs to me,_ the voice says. _But tell me, with what do you seek to bargain?_

“Uh, what kind of thing do you want?” Veth says, slipping a bolt into her crossbow. Caduceus narrows his eyes and adjusts her aim away from his foot and towards the darkness.

 _Variety_ , the voice murmurs. _Amusement._

Caleb is growing more concerned by the second. This creature is capable of reaching into minds, and clearly it is powerful enough to see them as merely diverting. What is it, what could it be? An aboleth, perhaps? A kraken? Everyone is tensing for action now, hands slipping to weapons and component pouches. Caleb would be happy if this didn’t devolve to action, for once.

“Siedaes, I advise you to tread more cautiously,” Essek says. _Verdammt nochmal_ , he’s still going. “We are not to be threatened. Now then, what are you?”

 _Your death, little morsel_ the voice whispers in their ears.

Essek’s composure slips. His eyes widen momentarily and he looks to Caleb, frowning sharply. Caleb has nothing with which to reassure him.

“This is bad,” Caduceus says gravely.

Siedaes says nothing more.

In the stillness, Caleb’s heart pounds impossibly loud; he can hear nothing else. _Keep it together_ , he thinks. He consciously slows and deepens the breaths of thick saltwater he’s drawing in. They’ve all moved close together now, everyone facing into the darkness, hands on their weapons and yet not daring to make the first move, waiting. They all know better than to think that Siedaes has left them, but what it is and where it will strike from — because surely it is poised to strike — both remain to be seen.

The stillness ends in an instant.

From nowhere, a sucking current pulls him down into the dark, pulls at all of them. Caleb’s stomach drops; he reaches for his teammates, but everything is whirling and murky debris whips past his face. They’re spinning round and down in a spiral of violent force and suction: a whirlpool. His Dancing Lights wink out as Caleb is bludgeoned on all sides with the swirling waters.

Swim. He has to swim.

It’s impossible. The water grips him and all of them with abominable force, spins them and tumbles them against each other like rocks. Someone’s foot connects hard with his ribs; he flails out and his elbow slams into someone else’s throat. He sees flashes of the others in his peripheral vision, registers Essek, Veth, Beauregard—Caduceus, a bright blip in his peripheral vision. His head spins and his limbs wrench—he has no breath—you _cannot_ pass out, he orders himself, _do not_ , knowing the futility of it—

The water slows. Then, almost as quickly as it had gathered them up, the whirlpool fades and ceases. Caleb is floating in dark water, dizzy and nauseous, breathless and aching. Caduceus’ staff lights the scattered shapes of his friends.

From above, Fjord shouts and throws his arm out, and there’s a bright flash of green as he shoots Eldritch Blast down into the deep, and in the briefest moment—

Caleb glimpses a dark shape down in the water. Long, huge. Moving.

Near Caleb, Essek mutters a word, low and harsh, in his native language. Caleb doesn’t understand the meaning—but he’s fairly sure he can guess. Essek is sharper-eyed in the dark than any of them. He’s seen the thing. And he is staring down in undisguised horror. Essek masters himself, looks to Caleb. “That,” he says faintly, “is a dragon.”

Well, at least it’s not a kraken, he thinks absurdly. Caleb sucks in a painful breath. He’s fairly sure he cracked a rib or two. Essek is also clutching his side, and as Caleb looks round to the others, he sees them similarly wincing and trying to right themselves, to breathe through pain. They’re all injured already, and they’ve barely even glimpsed this thing. Not good.

Caduceus is a short distance away, his staff still a beacon, and as Caleb watches, he calls to him the spectral swarm of insects that guard him. They surge around him in a gently glowing sphere.

“Veth!” Caleb shouts.

She is struggling so, so much. She kicks hard and flails—then she almost seems to shimmer briefly before she pushes out in a strong breast stroke, finding her way in moments to the safety of the Spiritual Guardians, to the light. It seemed she’s used her fragment of possibility for a chance not to be stranded in the dark.

From below them there is a rush of motion. Caleb looks down: a great reptilian maw of curved teeth, too many teeth, is rushing up at them with horrendous speed, a current swirling around it as it goes. He automatically shoots out a firebolt, registering as he does so that it’s all but useless; he’s already feeling for his component pouches and plotting his next move, a _useful_ move.

He can hear the others shouting above him, but he focuses on the beast approaching fast beneath him. It reaches them—and it’s _huge_ , its head alone longer than Caleb is tall—and shoots straight past Caleb to bite at Beauregard. She dodges, and it streaks past, then it pulls its long body around her, constricting her like a snake. She curses at it and begins to punch its scales as its muscles tighten the coil. Even in the chaos, the force it’s exerting on her is clear. She can’t break free.

Caleb fumbles for his molasses. The creature has no wings, he realises, but many flippers and a long snake-like body. It’s not a dragon, then, but something else: but _what_? What are its weaknesses? The creature unhinges its jaw. Fjord yells a few arcane words and holds out his arm, finger pointed: the darkness around the creature solidifies for a moment before sinking into its very scales. At the same time, Caleb feels a warm energy bolster him; he finds the vial of molasses. He smears it on his lip, gestures a pattern of slowing through the water and … the spell does not take hold. Fjord follows up his hex with more rounds of eldritch energy.

The creature ignores them all. It clamps its mouth down around Beau, and with a single gulp, it swallows her whole.

Yasha charges in with two mighty swings, and Essek flicks out a hand in her direction, directing even more velocity into her blows like he’d done earlier today. The creature roars and turns, slapping Yasha away with a lash of its mighty tail. Caleb can see now the pink glow of Jester’s unicorn swarm as she sends a crackling bolt of pink radiant magic at the creature.

The creature turns its great body, rolls, and dives down into the dark.

Yasha screams. Caleb fires an acid arrow at the retreating monster, already receding into the darkness. The water glows in different shades of green and pink as everyone unleashes their fury, swimming after it, unable to keep up. _What can I do, what can I do?_ He starts to dig out his cocoon: if he reverts back to the whale, he can keep up with this thing.

Caleb will _not_ leave Beauregard in this alone. None of them will.

_____________________

It’s fleeing; it _can’t_ flee. It has Beauregard — and Essek has unfinished business.

He starts to concentrate on the density of the water, to intensify the area around the behir, but before he can complete the thought, the creature has sped out of range. What can he do, what can he do? He can lighten the density of a teammate, let them catch up. He turns and looks to them all; who should he choose? Fjord swims easily and has both his magic and his sword, glowing bright blue against the dark. Yasha is feral muscle and rage as she rushes forward. _Which one?_

There is a great retching noise. The creature has stopped swimming, and is instead lashing its great body and hacking, like a cat coughing up a hairball. It opens its jaws, and expels something at great speed.

“Eat this, Seedy, you piece of shit!” It’s Beauregard’s voice.

Battered and bleeding, somehow she is now on the outside once more. She looks on the verge of collapse, swaying in the water as the creature curls in upon itself, growling. Still, she wastes no time: she swims up above it, grabs at the scaled ridges of its face, and drives her fist into its eye socket. She’s astonishing.

Something clicks into place in Essek’s mind. This creature—the massive snake-like body, the draconic silhouette, the many limbs, the —this thing is so very like a behir. They stalk the mountains of Xhorhas, notorious and formidable. He’s never heard of an aquatic variant. He’s not even sure this is useful information, at present.

To his right, Caleb swears — it seems his spell failed, again — and he begins digging in his bag for something else. It must be more than chance. Caleb is an accomplished caster. These repeat misses mean this _thing_ must have some magical defenses of its own. Essek takes note and tosses a Sapping Sting its way. Let it weaken its resolve on smaller spells, then.

Yasha streaks past Essek and slashes at its tail, carving deep into the hide. Essek moves forward too. If he can slow its movement, perhaps his teammates can finish it off. He begins concentrating again. He’s distracted when the bright lights of the specters swarming around Caduceus pass him by, and then he finds he, too, is now within their circle of protection. Caleb digs through his component pouch, intent on some plan, so focussed even in the chaos of battle. Veth has her crossbow pointed and ready.

“It doesn’t shoot far underwater,” she says in explanation. It makes sense; the water has resistance.

Something is happening beyond the swarm of spectral insects guarding them. The behir is back? No, no, the water is in chaos—another whirlpool—but this attack isn’t aimed at Essek or those within.

It’s hard to see much at all, but he can feel the slight pull of the water as it circles violently a short distance away. He looks to Caleb: stone-faced, nostrils flaring, Caleb breathes hard and with purpose. He’s trying to calm himself. Essek is trying to do the same, but one look at Caduceus and Essek’s control leaves him. The cleric is wide-eyed and gripping his staff too tightly; his other arm looks broken. How can they all survive this mess?

The pull on Essek subsides; the water has stilled once again.

“Jester!” Veth screams.

Essek follows her line of sight. Jester is floating, dimly lit by Caduceus’ magicks. The tiny pink unicorns she’d conjured have blinked out; she’s drifting in the dark, eyes half-open. She isn’t moving. Neither is Beauregard: her body turns slowly, her wounds still leaking cloudy blood into the water. Fjord is clutching at his shoulder and blinking hard. He looks like he’s fighting just to stay conscious. Even Yasha, fighting her way toward the behir, looks grim and sluggish, like she’s forcing herself to keep going.

The behir is circling, watching them all. Essek can’t tell whether Jester and Beauregard are alive or dead right now. Perhaps, in the circumstances, the difference is purely academic. It strikes Essek, for the second time this trip, that he is very probably about to die: all of them are.

This time, he has none of the shocky, distant calm that he’d drifted in when that displacer beast ripped out his throat. His pulse is rattling in his chest; he feels as though he’s soaking in fear, breathing it in. They must strike. He must strike. He must play for everything now.

The beast ignores Caduceus and those within the glowing insects. It ignores Beauregard, even though she’s currently easy pickings. Essek thinks he can understand why: clearly she’d proved a difficult meal to digest last time.

The behir opens its jaws wide and—horrified, Essek sees its choice coming—closes in on Jester. Caleb is already casting furiously, hand tracing sigils in the air. Just as the behir closes in on Jester, he releases Enlarge. Her body glows and she doubles in size. The beast's jaws slam into her torso, but she’s too large for it now. It can’t seem to fit its jaw all the way around. It’s still sickening to watch her body thrash through the water, blood streaming darkly around her, as the beast tries in vain to swallow her down. Essek’s hand is on his component pouch, his mind frantically cycling through spells.

Then, astonishingly, the behir lets her go. In a moment he’s realised why: it’s turning in the water, its long body shuddering and jerking, as it prepares to dive back into the deep. It’s as badly hurt as they are. It made one last attempt to get a meal, but now it’s just trying to escape with its life. It clears his allies, knocking Jester’s body aside as it goes. She drifts unmoving, a great half-moon of bite wounds on her torso leaking blood. Its face disappears into the deep.

“I think _not_ ”, Essek calls out.

The shard of raw onyx is in his palm already. He raises his right hand and grips the stone, drives the pad of his index finger onto its jagged point and, as a drop of his blood blooms into the water, gestures with all the focus and precision he has left in him. The onyx crumbles in his hand as the arcane energy fills the web he’s made for it; he takes aim. Then he unleashes his will.

The lightless sphere of gravitational force is centered upon the behir’s throat. It swims into it for a bare moment then stops and thrashes as the sphere of darkness swells out around it. Its screams cut off as the sphere envelops its head. There, that will do.

Essek keeps his arm extended, feeling brutal satisfaction as the creature struggles under the gravitational forces relentlessly crushing its muscle and bone. It thrashes, kicks out its flippers and sweeps its great tail weakly. Essek’s arm muscles are shaking. He can feel the behir slowly fighting its way out of the sphere. Somehow, the thing is not quite dead.

Fjord and Yasha have reached the edges of Essek’s spell, both, thankfully cautious, keeping just beyond touching distance of the sphere. They look to each other, and then to him—and for perhaps the first time, he _knows_ what the plan is here. Essek holds up a finger—wait—then he nods to them and drops the Dark Star.

Yasha drives her greatsword down with both hands. The blow cuts deep into the behir’s spine, and its rear half goes limp. Fjord’s sword flashes bright white, and he plunges the point of it straight into the wound Yasha has carved. The light bursts, blinding, and the behir screams. Its cry shudders through the water, rattles Essek’s bones and assaults his ears. The vibration is like an earthquake; Essek is sure the temple itself is shaking, will fall down on them all. He can’t shut his eyes against the light and tries to cover his ears to drown out the scream; his own skull feels like it might split open.

The creature’s screech ends, and it falls still. As Essek’s ears ring in the silence, it slowly begins to sink. One of its webbed limbs twitches weakly as its thick blood drifts out of its wounds. _Our death, was it?_ He turns and looks to the Mighty Nein. He can’t help but feel triumphant at this victory, hard-won and narrow as it was.

Oh no.

The others are all huddling together around the bodies of Beauregard and Jester. Veth is holding Jester from behind, stroking her hair; Caleb cradles Beauregard in his arms, one hand to her forehead. Caduceus’ glowing insects are gone; only the light of his staff crystal remains. Fjord and Yasha are already making their way to the group, swimming at a pace Essek could never hope to match. The triumph in him freezes to dread as Essek pushes his way forward, muscles burning. He remembers Jester’s merry sing-song from two nights before: _We only have the one diamond, so it’d be really super cool if no one died tomorrow!_

Let them be in time. Please, let them be in time.

[A text version of our custom monster stat block can be found on tumblr!](https://bob-fish.tumblr.com/post/616315672635555840/oceanic-behir-huge-monstrosity-attributes-ac-19)


	3. Chapter 3

She’s spinning, everything is a dark blur, and her stomach flops gracelessly inside her. It _hurts_ , and she gulps back the bile that’s fighting to come out.

Jester grabs her middle with both hands, chokes and gasps. She grasps someone’s arm. She blinks: Caduceus’ hand is on her stomach, warm and glowing as the last of his spell melts into her. She feels sharp twinges as the magic puts her back together. Oh, that always feels so weird. 

“Hey there,” Caduceus says, grinning.

She feels woozy. _Oh no. Was she knocked out?_

“Thank you, Caduceus!” She squeezes his hand in hers, and rights herself in the water faster than feels good. “Is everyone okay? Did Seedy let us go?”

“Not quite,” Fjord says.

“Caduceus?” Caleb calls. Jester looks to him, and sees Caleb holding onto Beau from behind, one arm around her torso and the other cradling her cheek. Beau is limp, her limbs drifting in the water, her mouth open. Jester can’t see her breathing. _Oh no._

“Beau!” 

Jester kicks her way over to them as hard as she can. Her hands are over Beau’s heart immediately. It’s beating; Jester’s own heart skips a beat as she feels Beau’s pulse faintly in her chest. She summons the largest healing spell she can muster, she closes her eyes, and she prays. The Traveler is there for her. It doesn’t matter what he calls himself or where he came from, he’s her best friend, and he knows when she needs his help, and he would never, ever let her down. She can feel the life still in Beau, hanging on, fighting. She can feel the warmth that’s her friend, guiding her hand and lending her power. She lets it all flood into Beau with everything she has. It’s going to be okay. Beau’s going to be okay—

“Fuck!” Beau yells, and thrashes in Caleb’s arms. “Owwww. Where the—”

“It’s okay,” Jester says, “you’re okay! Everything’s fine, and—”

“The uh, dragon-eel-snake thing, whatever, it’s down,” Fjord calls. “You’re good.”

“Behir,” Essek says. 

“What d’you call me?” Beau says. 

“The creature. I think it was a behir.”

“Oh, a _behir_. As in, huge serpent thing? I mean, my source here is my superstitious family when I was a kid telling me they’d get us if we wandered off the path up in the mountains. Do they live underwater too—“ Beau frowns and pushes herself away from Caleb, and Jester’s hand slips down— “Aaah.”

“Oh!” Her hand is right on Beau’s left boob. She whisks it away and waves it. “Oops! Sorry, that was totally accidental—because of how you moved up and my hand didn’t move—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Beau says, nodding vigorously. “It’s cool, it’s no big deal—”

“So I wasn’t being a creeper or anything like that. But it’s really a very nice boob, I mean just so you know.” Beau’s face has got that look people sometimes get when Jester talks a lot. If she keeps right on going, though, they usually chill. “It’s firm,” Jester says. “But there’s enough smoosh, you know?”

“Cool,” Beau says, still nodding. “Cool, cool cool.” 

“I think it’s an oceanic variant,” Essek says. He’s doing that thing with his face. “Of behir. I haven’t heard of such a thing, but there it is. Or rather was.” He points down into the dark water, where Jester supposes Seedy must have sunk. 

“So here’s the thing,” Beau says. “We’re all kind of beat up and low on spells. We really need to get whatever it is we came here to do, _done_ , so that we can get out of here before something else sniffs us out and causes trouble.”

“Yeah, good call, Beau.” Fjord sounds very official and captain-y. “I’d say we keep heading down. The other keyholes have all been at the very bottom.” 

“Aye, aye, Captain!” Jester salutes him. Veth does the same. “Let’s go find Uk’otoa’s _keyhole._ ”

Caleb laughs quietly and sends his dancing lights out ahead of the group. They swim down, down, down. When Jester looks up, all there is around them is darkness, and that gives her a bad squishy feeling in her stomach—although to be fair, Seedy squished her pretty bad already. 

It feels like they’ve swum down deeper than the lake could even be. How deep can lakes get, though? It’s not like she’s dived in tons of them. 

They don’t talk much while they swim. Everyone is all serious-faced; Caduceus and Caleb just look straight-up super worried. Jester is a little worried herself, kind of. That fight got bad. She was knocked out cold, and she can feel she doesn’t have that many spells left in her for today. Beau got swallowed and spit up and got knocked out, too; everyone looks kind of beaten to shit, actually. She feels bad that she made them worry about her when they’re all messed up. It’s her job to keep everyone safe! Her and Caduceus. He’ll have the diamond safe. It really doesn’t feel so great just having the one. It doesn’t feel like enough. Things have gotten really bad too often lately: Fjord dead on the rain-soaked deck of the ship, Essek lying all ripped up on the jungle floor, Beau just now … Jester herself maybe … no, they’ve gotta finish this fast. Bamf to the ship, get to Rumblecusp, then everything will be all cool. 

Eventually, the magical lights reach the bottom of the lake. There’s Seedy below them, lying on what looks like the lake bed—or a stone floor? Anyway, he’s super fucking dead. That’s super obvious.

Veth points to her left. “I found the well!” 

Everyone gathers in a group on one part of the lake floor. The well looks the same as those in the last two temples, at least as much as Jester can recall: a hole in the bottom about ten feet round and leading down, even deeper down. 

“So now we can … what was it we were going to do?” Veth looks around all of them. “I mean, we’re not going to actually release Uk’otoa, right?”

Essek does one of his rare, actually-shocked faces. “Did you say: _release_ him?”

“Well,” Fjord says. “Like I explained, there were three seals keeping Uk’otoa bound, each located within a temple to him. A companion of ours—”

“Captain Avantika,” Jester chips in. 

“She was very into Fjord,” Veth adds. “And into Uk’otoa. She was sort of sexy, evil, very big hat—” 

“ _Captain Avantika_ ,” Fjord says, “released one seal. And I’m uh, I’m afraid I released the other one.”

Caduceus puts a hand on Fjord’s shoulder. “So, what do we do with this one?” 

Fjord sucks in a deep breath. “Well, we’ve got the key to this lock sealed away and out of sight. So that’s something.”

“There are many, many ways to break an arcane lock,” Essek says, lifting an eyebrow. “I presume we went to the considerable trouble of reaching this one so that we can do something more permanent about it?”

“Well,” Fjord says, “I wasn’t exactly sure what condition this one would be in. But yes. If we want to make sure no one can ever release the seal, we should somehow destroy this lock maybe? Or at least make it inaccessible?” He spreads a hand. “I’m open to ideas.”

“We could blow it up!” Veth says. “Wait. Would that break the seal to release him, though?” 

“I’m not sure,” Caleb answers. “I’d rather not risk it.”

“We could hide it,” Yasha says. “We could get rocks. Lots of them.”

“I have a feeling Uk’otoa knows where this seal is, though,” Caduceus says. “Just hiding it from sight isn’t enough. We have to stop anyone being able to use it.”

“Can we block the well?” Beau says.

“Rocks,” Yasha says again. 

“Oh!” Jester says. She’s had an idea! “Oh! I could paint over the keyhole! You know, like fill it in so it’s just smooth stone at the bottom. That way if someone makes a new key, there’s nowhere to put it? I don’t know if I can paint underwater though, that’s the thing.”

“That … that actually might work,” Caleb says. He’s got a glint in his eye that tells Jester she landed on something right, and she grins. It’s a good feeling, helping her friends. 

“I’m going to try something,” Caduceus says. “Not sure it’s gonna work, but. You all should, ah, move behind me a ways.”

Jester thinks she has an idea of what he might try—damn, she really should have brought some water spells today, huh? That’s okay, Caduceus will do a good job with this. He always does. The Mighty Nein all gather behind Caduceus, away from the well. Jester clasps her hands together and hopes the Wildmother can guide him in this. She usually does a pretty good job when it really matters. Oh man, maybe she should also ask the Traveler to help, too; she’s always forgetting to do that in the moment!

Caduceus raises his staff and around him, the water parts, inch by inch, draining from the well and the space above it as far as Jester can see—and then the next moment, the space is just gone. The current swirls outward and down, slowly filling back to the places it had been moments before.

“What happened?” Jester asks, touching his back and looking down into the dark below. 

Caduceus sighs. “I was hoping I could part the water and create a trench, but we’re just too deep down. I can’t break the surface.”

“It would have been great, though,” Jester says, “if it had worked, it was a great idea.”

“Hey, Essek,” Beau says. “Couldn’t you, like, dunamance the water out of the way?”

“Dunamance is not a word,” Essek says. “And yes, but only for mere moments.”

“You can’t hold it like you did with the eelhounds?” Fjord asks. 

Jester perks up. “Or like the chair in the air?” 

Essek does that face he does when he’s getting annoyed. “Those are … different effects, with distinct arcane mechanisms.”

“How long could you give us with that graviturgy spell?” Caleb asks. 

“Five, six seconds?” Essek says. “It is a single wave of pressure originating from myself, expanding outwards, and I could push the water a few feet back. Jester, would that be enough time to apply the pigments?”

Jester pulls a face. She really wants this to work, but— “I dunno. That’s not a _lot_. Could you like, cast it twice? Three times?”

Essek frowns. “This spell does not work like that. Singular motion. As I said. ”

“Well,” Veth says, “could you _make_ it work like that?” 

“How, exactly?”

“Couldn’t you just … concentrate it? Clear a smaller area, but for a longer time?”  
  
“Thank you, this is not an alchemical compound.” Essek’s getting snippy. He’s wound pretty tight right now, Jester thinks; they all are. 

“I know that!” Veth says. 

“Essek.” Caleb puts a hand to Essek’s upper arm and spreads his other hand as he talks. “This is a stretch, I know, and I’m only a novice where dunamancy is concerned, but might we consider any of the usual ways of extending a spell’s power? An increase of energy or of component material?”

Essek exhales. He’s calmer, like, instantly. Oh, that’s cute. “This spell has no material component … ah!” He tilts his head. “Yes. If we added iron, and adjusted … I think this might actually be worth a shot.”

“ _Thank you_ for that great suggestion, Veth,” Veth says flatly and with a bit of bite. 

“Thank you for the suggestion,” Essek repeats. He sighs. “I’m a little tense.” Then, as if someone reminded him to say it, “I am sorry.” He mutters a few words, and a large piece of paper marked with a bunch of spell glyphs seems to shimmer in the water. “Well, here is the spell as it stands. Caleb, Veth, if I might borrow you for a moment? Let us see what we can adjust.”

“Uh,” Beau says, “how long exactly is this research meeting gonna take? Because this isn’t a good place to be hanging around.”

Caleb is frowning over the illusory paper, tracing his fingers over the glyphs. “Might we have something in five minutes?” he says. 

Essek barks a laugh. “We are doing the impossible—but sure. Why not?”

“That’s our brand,” Beau says, pumping a fist. 

Caleb, Veth and Essek cluster round the paper. Ooh, this is gonna be good. Jester leans in, trying to catch some of the muttering. 

“… to create a more stabilised wall of pressure, as it were,” Caleb is saying. “Might we adjust this intersection here?”

“Ah,” Essek say, “I think yes, but perhaps _here_ , instead, before the flow branches, because—” 

This is … not as cool as Jester thought it might be. 

“Okay, tell me if this is wrong, ” Veth cuts in, “but if F is the force we’re exerting, and it’s equal to the mass of the water multiplied by the acceleration, then—”

Oh no, fuck it, this is just super boring, even the wizards flirting can’t save it. Jester glances around, vaguely tuning in and out of blah blah blah calculations and do dee do material components. She can’t imagine casting spells like that. She likes it her way, where you just _do_ the magic, let it flow through her like a lamp wick drawing oil from its bowl to light the flame. 

She catches sight of the behir, lying on its side a little way back on the stone floor. It looks _super_ fucked up. Jester taps Fjord’s shoulder, then swims closer to get a better look. Wow, those are really really a lot of teeth. No wonder her tummy hurt so bad. The behir’s tongue is hanging swollen out of its mouth, its eyes bulging. Its whole front half looks like it was stomped on, or like someone squeezed really hard and crushed it in on itself. Oh wow, that’s got to be Essek, like he did to the Scourger lady. And then there’s a big, big wound cleaved in its back behind the neck, like someone went choppa choppa with a huge ax. Okay, so that’s Yasha and one of her giant swords … but the wound’s burned to crap inside. Did she do that? No, she was unconscious—Fjord! He smited it! Smote it? Him or Caduceus. Jester is pretty pleased with her detective work. It’s like she can recognise her friends from the ways they kill things. It’s sweet, really. It’s a teamwork corpse! This is going to make such a cool journal page. The Traveler is gonna love it. Maybe it’ll cheer him up, he’s been so super stressed about TravelerCon, and that’s so not like him—

“Jester!” Caleb calls. “We are ready for you!” Oh. Okay, fair, she was getting kind of distracted. 

“Coming!” she yells. She turns it into a whisper halfway through. “Just taking a look at Seedy, you guys really beat him to shit!”

“So we may have something,” Essek says. “Jester, if what I’m going to attempt works, I can give you one minute. However.” He pauses and gives her an intensely dramatic look. “There is significant risk. This spell involves a very powerful application of graviturgy, and the barrier it creates will have crushing force. And it is experimental. One tests in a laboratory for a reason, and—”

“And we do not have that time,” Caleb says, “This is our best shot.”

“It’s okay, Essek,” Jester says. She can see him losing the fight within himself. She can tell he wants to object to this again, but if Caleb says this is their best shot, then it’s their best shot. Jester can _do_ this, she really can. Holding his gaze, she moves up to grab Essek’s hands in hers. “Let’s do it. We can finish this, Essek, I know we can.” 

“So should we _all_ head down or?” Fjord asks. “Usually it’s me that does this part, except, well, it’s different this time.”

“We should probably head down part way,” Caleb says. “So that we can act if need be.”

“How far down are we heading?” Essek asks as he peers over the lip of the open well. Jester squeezes his hand.

“To the bottom,” Fjord says, pointing. “That’s where the keyhole is.”

Caleb squeezes Essek’s other hand, and they look at each other and _oh_. Jester reaches to the person next to her, Veth, and bends down to squeeze her hand too.

“Let’s get this fucking _done_ so we can get out of here,” Beau says sternly. Beau has been super on edge since she woke up, and Jester totally understands that feeling. It’s really awful to be the reason everyone worries, and only a few minutes back, the two of them were kind of in a pickle. Pickle is a weird word when you say it too many times, but then that’s most words—

“All right, Jester.” Essek has a strained look on his face. “Let’s see if we make history today.” 

She grins at him reassuringly. Then, the two of them begin the swim down to the bottom of the well. It’s dark, though they can still make out what’s ahead of them, even if it isn’t much aside from more darkness and algae-covered rock. The others follow them part of the way down before pausing in place. Soon enough, Jester and Essek arrive at the bottom. The others are waiting for them above, their lights shining around their silhouettes. That’s probably good, just in case. Here on the floor, there is a small circular depression in the stone, roughly the same size as the orbs Fjord had swallowed. She bends down to trace her finger over it. It seems innocent enough, if just a little slimy.

Essek sucks in a breath. He’s frowning very slightly as he looks at her, but his eyes are giving away how worried he really is. He said this is going to be pretty dangerous, and she believes him. She knows they can do it, though. They have to; her friends need her to. 

“Jester,” Essek says, “Take a deep breath. The air created by the spell likely will not be breathable, bear it in mind. I also can’t guarantee for how long I can hold back the water, so please do be ready to act quickly.”

She elbows him in the side. “Of course.”

They both get into place, and Jester swings her haversack down, ready to pull out her paints. 

“Another thing,” Essek says. “It would probably be better if possible if we could be elsewhere immediately when the spell drops, so—”

“Oh! That’s cool, when I’m done you just keep concentrating and I can Dimension Door us out. Okay?”

Essek nods, visibly relieved. He hustles her in close to him and raises a hand, begins to trace signs in the air. Sparkling powdered iron seeps from his clasped fingers. The water begins to lift from her ankles, and with fascination she watches it rise. 

Under his breath, Essek mutters a harsh word she doesn’t recognise—it’s totally a swear, though—and in his hand the powdered iron flashes red hot, then crumbles away. He whips his hand back, hissing. The water slaps back down around their ankles. Essek closes his eyes and huffs out a forceful breath of saltwater.

“It needs more iron, I think,” Caleb shouts from above. 

“Much more,” Essek says, shaking his head. “And a rather higher level of expenditure of ability. But I cannot try this many more times. I need enough energy left to take us away from this place.”

“Concentrate it more, too!” Veth adds. “Make it stronger, the water totally seeped right in.”

Jester looks back at everyone else. They’ve crept a little ways closer, but it’s still hard to make them out from here. The wizards are both replying to Veth. They are totally getting into the nitty gritty of this spell, like really into it.

“All right,” Essek says. “Let us attempt this again. Jester?”

“Ready!” 

Essek draws in a breath, face tight with concentration, and dips one hand into his component pouch. Jester puts a hand to his shoulder. “May the Traveller guide you,” she says, and feels a comforting little pulse of divine power release from her into Essek. His shoulder jumps very slightly and his eyes widen. “You can do it, Essek, I believe in you!” she whispers. “Sorry, you’re probably trying to concentrate, I should stop talking now.” Oh, yes, and now she should actually stop talking. 

Essek is muttering the spell’s formula now, gesturing a glyph into the water, quick and precise, the powdered iron in his hand sinking into the trails of light. Jester sucks in a deep breath of salty lakewater and prepares to hold it. Then Essek flicks out his hand upwards in a pushing motion, and the spell releases. Jester feels the wave of pressure shudder past her, then the water just seems to suck itself away from them both. This time it holds: a dome above their heads, as if they’re standing in a glass bubble. Essek keeps his arm extended over his head, totally focussed. 

Jester mentally shakes herself: quick! Paint it! _Help me out here_ , she prays as she loads her brush up with paint and begins to lay down strokes across the keyhole. The stone is slick with lake stuff, but her paints immediately begin to fill the recess with what looks like more wet stone. She chances a quick glance over her shoulder; Essek is still holding back the water above them with an invisible wall of force. Gravity magic is so fucking cool—and her paints are pretty great too, she thinks, as the keyhole starts to disappear under the seaweed-strewn stone that rises up from her brushstrokes. 

“Jester,” she hears Essek say, quick and strained. A small stream of water starts to splatter on the floor to her right. Then another splashes on her shoulder.

“Nearly, nearly done!” 

She lays down the final stroke, and the paint shimmers from wet pigment to form seamlessly into the smooth, green-covered stone of the rest of the floor. Looking good— _oh_. Essek’s hand is shaking, his jaw clenched as the dome just above their heads starts to shake and bulge. Dimension Door time, then—

The water crashes down. 

Jester thinks she loses a moment or two, because the next thing she knows, she’s on the stone floor, underwater again, and it feels like a fucking building got dropped on her. She groans and sits up, and registers Beau is right there, a hand to her shoulder. She nods. “I’m okay.” 

Essek is conscious, just about, but he looks worse off than Jester, blinking dizzily as Caduceus helps him up. “Did it work?” he asks, wincing.

Fjord scuffs the new flagstone with the toe of his boot. “Yeah!” he says. “That looks good, that—this is the right place, yeah?”

Jester nods. 

“Jester, my apologies,” Essek says. “The spell broke faster than I anticipated. Experimental magic outside of laboratory conditions is r—” 

“Ah,” Caduceus says. His ears flatten back against his head and his eyes dart. “We need to get out of here.” Jester gets those danger tingles in her tummy. 

Caleb’s voice lowers. “We have more company?” Caduceus nods. “Essek?”

“Yes. Everyone gather, quickly.”

Do they even know where they’re going? It’s been days since they’ve last been on the ship; Orly is a good navigator, so they could be anywhere by now. 

"Hey Orly, it's Jester!” Fjord starts counting out the words for her on both hands in clear view; she’s got plenty left. “We just wanted to find out where you guys are right now so we can come back.” Fjord holds up four fingers. “We love you! Bye!"

As Orly’s warm voice speaks so that only she can hear, Essek catches her eye and—Orly’s nearly finished his reply now—she repeats the coordinates aloud; Essek holds his hand out to Jester and she takes hold of it, gladly, as the world shifts and blurs around them all.

_____________________

They’re in the ocean.

Literally: he’s landed them all directly in the Lucidian, unless he also missed the very sea he was aiming for; given his growing list of failures, he’s more likely to believe it than not. He coughs out the saltwater from his lungs and takes a breath of salty air instead. Essek is really and truly ready to never swim again, unless it’s a luxuriously deep indoor bath.

“Where are we?” Beauregard asks, as she removes the tinted goggles from her face.

Essek is also adjusting to the obnoxiously bright sunlight as it bounces off the water’s surface, directly into his eyes. Something knocks into him as he treads water. He swivels around and squints at Yasha with her back to him; her giant sword strapped to her as she, too, fights to stay at the surface. She looks exhausted, though she’s said nothing of it that he’s heard.

“There’s the Ball Eater!” Jester cheers. “Essek, you did it!” 

Before he can see where the ship is, she swims over and wraps her wet, billowy sleeves around him—one sleeve is now plastered to his face—and she squeezes him in what must be a hug, though it feels an awful lot like drowning. Essek is drowning.

She releases him not a moment too soon. Essek is still … grateful that Jester is here to offer him such hugs. Beauregard punches his shoulder in a barbaric congratulatory manner, and he is weirdly grateful for that, too.

“You did it,” Caleb says more quietly.

“I’ve missed the boat.”

He still hasn’t even seen the ship—ah, there it is, and he has missed it by a full mile despite the coordinates provided by the ship’s navigator. Has he not done this enough times already to master the technique? Essek clenches his jaw, nearly biting his cheek. This is now the second obvious teleportation miss the Mighty Nein have witnessed.

“Teleportation without a landing circle is difficult in the best of circumstances, and yet you have consistently delivered us to our destination with little more than a pinpoint on a map.” Caleb gives him a look that makes Essek’s heart skip a beat. “I don’t think there are many who could boast such a thing.”

“Yeah, Essek,” Jester adds, “you did such a great job!” 

He starts to refute the statement and then stops. It’s a knee jerk reaction, to reject praise where it’s not deserved … but there is a sincerity in her words and, for the briefest moment, a sadness in her eyes; he is suddenly compelled by the urge not to make this girl sad ever again … this girl so full of love for her friends, who sees the world worth saving and would do everything in her power and beyond to see it saved, to see her friends safe. Essek has been intrigued by Jester since their first meeting, but after today, he thinks that he’s beginning to understand the effect she has on him, on the world around her. This is … he needs someplace quiet and devoid of active threats on his life to process the last few days.

“Well, maybe it’s just me, but I would have preferred we land on the boat,” Veth says.

Caleb chuckles, and Essek mirrors him before he can stop himself. He’s starting to appreciate her dry humor the more he comes to recognize it as such.

“If you find my teleportation services are lacking, Veth, please do feel free to perform the group teleport to a moving ship yourself. I would be glad to observe.”

“Eh, I’ll leave that to the wizards. Fjord!” Veth calls.

“You all right?” Fjord asks, and then he makes a gargled yelp as Veth climbs onto his shoulders and activates her Water Walking magic. 

Veth stands up, straightens her dress, then starts to squeeze the water from her plaits. “This is better. Thanks, Fjord!” 

“No problem,” Fjord says flatly.

It’s an inspired move, and one Essek now wishes to emulate.

“Veth?” Essek holds out a hand over his head. A swell of water crashes into his face, and when it passes he coughs and goes to scrub the saltwater from his face when a strong hand grabs his hand from him and begins to pull upward.

Automatically, Essek conjures his hover spell and lifts himself up out of the water. He finger-combs his hair back out of his eyes, squeezing out some of the water. He shades his eyes with a hand. He’s getting a headache from the sun already. Ah! He pulls the parasol from his bag and opens it. 

“Yes, this is indeed much better. Thank you.”

“You kept the parasol!” Jester squeaks. “Did you like it? Do you love it?”

Clothes plastered to his body, water dripping down the back of his neck, Essek smiles at her and cants his head in a nod. Then he holds out the parasol to Veth and gestures with an open palm. 

“Oh,” she says. “Thanks, Essek. I’m good here. I’m gonna enjoy the sunlight on my face.” She spreads her arms and twirls on the surface of the water. 

“Can we get moving now?” Beauregard shouts. “I’m fucking starving.”

“Yes, a good meal would be great,” Caduceus calls.

Veth strikes a pose, one hand on her hip and the other outstretched to point ahead of her. “To the ship!”

_____________________

Jester’s tail knocks Essek’s notebook lazily as she lays on her stomach, humming and drawing. His quill spits a large glop of ink on the paper, and he blinks rapidly, lifts the book and carefully draws a piece of blotting paper from inside the back cover. Somehow, he manages to avoid getting ink on himself or his notes. Jester and her tail notice none of this. On the floor across Jester’s room, backs against the wall, Caleb and Veth are both leaning into each other, shoulder to shoulder. Caleb completed his rapid notations a while back, and is now sitting reading what looks to be a terrible novel while Veth writes a letter. 

They all had arrived at the ship earlier this evening, just as the sun was beginning to redden in the sky and begin its descent. They’d taken some time afterward to eat, rest, and see to themselves. Fjord had been kind enough to allow Essek a few minutes in the captain’s quarters to change clothes. The simple wood-panelled cabin seemed, in the context of the past few days, astonishing in its luxury: a covered jug and bowl with fresh water, a small mirror set into the washstand, a comfortable chair and an enclosed bed. Even bracing for it, Essek found himself a little startled by the person in the mirror. Essek’s hair was frankly no better than a mop, tousled by the wind and stiff with seawater. He’d caught the sun on his nose and cheeks. As for his clothes, they had endured far more than cantrips could be expected to mend. A few minutes allowed him to address some of the worst of it. Now, having washed and changed and done something about his hair, Essek feels far more settled and in place. 

Essek pauses for a moment while the ink splotch dries. He’s trying to remember exactly how much iron filings he’d used earlier today, and it’s easier said than done. Caleb, at least, had remembered the verbal and somatic changes they’d made to the spell, but it had been Essek who pulled from his component stores and Essek who cast the spell. It’s all such a blur in his mind now. The thrill of having successfully completed an experiment in the field is now tainted with the frustration of inexact trial notes; or, more precisely, zero notes and only memories made hazy by the frenetic moment. 

He shifts and winces. It’s clear after sitting for a while how very sore every muscle in his body is. Essek is exhausted to the bone: bruises, pulled muscles, blisters, tight skin over healed wounds and ribs that twinge when he breathes. He hasn’t taken his rest on a bed or washed—unless one counts either filthy lake water or prestidigitation, which he does not—in three days. He hasn’t had a moment _alone_ in three days. He has been on the brink of death at least twice. He’s fairly certain there’s still ooze in his hair.

He sighs and takes a curious peek at Jester’s notebook—or at least tries to. He’s been sitting at the head of the bed while she has been lying on her stomach with her notebook toward the opposite end. He’d not expected her to lay like that, but in a way, he supposes he should have guessed such a thing. He leans forward as much as he dares: and his muscles throb and pull with each small movement he makes … and is that drawing meant to be him and Caleb? A small crimson weasel peeks back at him from under Jester’s hair while she draws. It tilts its head and considers Essek carefully for a moment. Jester reaches up and scratches the top of its head automatically.

There’s a soft knock at the cabin door. Caleb looks up from his reading, and Jester’s pen stills as the door creaks open.

“Ah, the captain’s asked me to round up the Mighty Nein for a meeting on deck.” It’s the blond crewman, Marius, if Essek can recall properly. 

“Okay!” Jester says brightly. She stows her drawings in her bag hastily and bounds out of the room as Essek holds steady his own work. Caleb places his book into his satchel much more carefully and stands to follow after her. He stops in the doorway to look back at Essek and lift an eyebrow before disappearing into the narrow passageway beyond. Veth stands, stretches, and looks to Essek curiously before shrugging and leaving as well.

Marius clears his throat. “…so does that include you? Or…?” 

Essek huffs out a laugh. He doesn’t actually know the answer to the question, but he closes his notebook all the same and makes to join the others. He could use the excuse of needing fresh air should he need to. When he steps into the hall, he finds Marius waiting for him. Marius points his index fingers at Essek and makes an affirmative noise before leading the way topside. 

“That’s a good-looking outfit,” Marius says, then gestures to himself. “I find it’s hard to maintain finery when you’re on the seas, but I do what I can.” 

Did he just … flex his arm?

Essek was a little self-conscious earlier about his choice of clothes, or rather the fact that half the outfit remains in his bag. The heat is getting to him, and the thought of putting on the stiff sleeves and jacket was unbearable. Instead, he’s wearing an open vest over a sheer silk undershirt with high-waisted, close-fitting dark pants. At least half the crew of this boat are wearing even less, and nobody but him knows how scandalously underdressed he is by Rohsohna high society standards. Yet, he finds himself enjoying this, the piratical fitted clothing and bare arms. If Marius likes it, he only hopes for a reaction from Caleb.

Essek looks more carefully at Marius: his clothes have the distinct look of having been purchased and artfully distressed. Essek chuckles softly to himself.

“Well, thank you,” Essek says evenly. “Maintaining appearances is a priority many people overlook.” 

Marius laughs at the joke. “You can say that again. It’s nice having someone more, ah, mindful of their appearance on board.”

Essek can’t quite stop himself from smirking, and so he brushes ahead of Marius instead and lets it happen.

They slowly make their way through the cannons of the gun deck on their way to the stairs. The more time he’s spent on ships the past week, the more Essek has come to appreciate how very much he misses his towers and the space within. The decks seem too narrow, with too little breathing room, and he’s not exactly the largest figure aboard. He’s wondered how the tortle gets between decks once already. 

“So will you be joining us to our destination?” Marius asks, his voice raising in a timid warble.

“Perhaps,” Essek responds, “but first, our meeting and a night’s rest, I think.”

Essek has … a lot to consider in regards to his return. He should see to this discussion now so that he has all the facts before him. He ignores the voice in his head that reminds him that he only knew of this meeting the last few minutes, and that he should already know his next steps. _We don’t yet have all of the facts,_ he tells himself. He breeches the topside of the ship and spots everyone gathered around the center mast. Facts first, then rest. Right. 

_____________________

_____________________

Yasha leans against the rail of the ship as she waits for the rest of the Mighty Nein. It’s a quiet evening, with few clouds in sight. Truth be told, she was hoping for more of a sign than that; perhaps some dark clouds or the rumble of thunder to tell her she’s on the right path. She hopes, perhaps a bit selfishly, that it’s not a dream. The dreams haunt her more than the silence.

Fjord comes down from the aft deck and surveys the group. “Where’s Beau?”

There is a brief exchange between him and the others, but Yasha finds herself drawn instead to the drow wizard who is now settling himself at the periphery of the group. His arms are crossed with his hands tucked tightly to him, with his shoulders slightly hunched forward as though he’s trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. He’s already pretty small … but Yasha knows that feeling too well. She can sympathise.

She pushes herself off the rail and makes her way to him. He’s so distracted by trying to disappear that he doesn’t seem to notice her approach.

“I’ve been watching you,” she tells Essek. She smiles when he flinches and comes to attention.

“Oh?” His eyes flick nervously to either side as he takes in the scenario. “And?”

“You did the right thing when it mattered. That means something.”

It does mean something, but she’s not sure she has the words to tell him exactly what. She’s not sure she even needs to, given the heavy look on his face as he lets go of the breath he’s been holding and faces out toward the dark sea. He knows some of what she’s done, by choice or otherwise; she’s shared some of her worst moments while he was there to bear witness, but he’s also seen her do good things. She wonders what he must think of her.

“Sorry I’m late,” Beau calls as she jogs up to them. “I had to wait for fucking Marius to get back.”

“So,” Veth starts, “what are we talking about?”

Fjord clears his throat. “Well, we should be at Rumblecusp sometime tomorrow, and I thought it’d be good to like, check in and see what the plan is.” Everyone looks to Jester.

“Well I’ve made all of the parting gifts for everyone, and I’m almost done with the cloaks—I’ve made _so_ many cloaks, you guys. I guess I should ask the Traveler what else he needs me to do before we get there? _Oh, Traveler! What else should I do for this con before we get there?_ ”

Yasha grimaces. She sort of hates how this Traveler figure has duped Jester. No, she really hates it. She’s told Jester as much, or she tried to, but it seems Jester is continuing to stay the course and follow this guy, even though he’s clearly nothing more than a trickster.

“There is another matter we should discuss, I think.” Caleb says. “Fjord, you have ruined Uk’otoa’s last chance at freedom: what retribution or revenge might we expect to follow?”

“Uh, what?” Fjord looks genuinely confused.

“It seems pretty clear to me that the, uh, _Snea Snake_ ,” Caleb makes quotation marks in the air with both hands, “had already marked you down for death for your betrayal. I can’t help but believe there will be more to come now that you’ve taken things even further.”

Fjord rubs his chin for a moment, mulling it over. 

“Fuck Uk’otoa,” Beau says firmly. “Whatever shit he wants to throw Fjord’s way, bring it. I’m ready.”

Caleb steps forward. “So am I, Beauregard, but I thought it was worth discussing as a group, especially while we are still at sea.”

“You think more of those fish people will attack?” Yasha asks. She’d love to dismember a few more of those slimy fuckers.

“It seems likely,” Caleb answers. “So we should take extra precautions against it as we have a few more days until TravelerCon. Fjord?”

“Oh, definitely.” Fjord says. “I definitely think we should keep watches going. The bubble at night.”

“Consider it done,” Caleb says.

Veth clears her throat loudly. “But here’s another question: is it safe to even stay on the water?” In Uk’otoa’s territory? Maybe we should teleport back to Nicodranas or wherever?”

“If someone has set their heart on vengeance, there’s no place too far to seek it,” Caduceus chimes in. “I don’t think anywhere will be more safe for Fjord now.” He has a very serious look to him, heavier than his usual gentle solemnity.

“Fjord, should you ask the Wildmother what to do?” Jester asks. “I can ask the Traveler to help keep you safe while you help us with everything too.”

“Thanks, Jester.” 

“Are you prepared, Fjord?” Caleb asks. “To always watch your back while he pursues you? This being, he has been around since before the Calamity. He has nothing but time on his side.” Caleb has a hard look to him, and Yasha knows why. Caleb has spent years on the run, always looking over his shoulder, and in the end he was found out anyhow. Yasha tries not to think about when it will be her turn to face her past actions. 

“Well, it was my ignorance and actions that led to two of the seals being broken,” Fjord says quietly, “and I suppose I felt a sense of duty to see that the third seal remain intact. If Uk’otoa is to be my end, then I’d like to go down fighting.”

Caduceus steps up and places his hand on Fjord’s shoulder. “We’re behind you, Fjord.” Caduceus turns to Essek. “We’re behind you too, Essek, if this is the path you choose to walk.”

Essek’s eyes go wide and he gives them all a worried look. “I’m sorry?”

“If you choose to walk this path with us, we’ll support you,” Caduceus says. He looks to the rest of them, eyebrows drawn tight in question. “We will, won’t we?”

It’s a good question. Yasha still has her reservations, but he’s shown some real promise on this trip. It’s not like she can fairly judge him for what he’s done; she has no room to judge anyone, but that doesn’t mean she’ll trust him blindly either.

“Of course!” Jester says. “Essek, you’ll stay with us, won’t you?”

Essek opens his mouth slightly and says nothing. His thoughts are clearly racing faster than he can track.

“He will stay with us until the morning, at least.” Caleb answers for him. “We have a few things to discuss before he departs.”

“Yes, I will stay one more night, at least.”

“Oh but _Essek_ , you really must stay for TravelerCon. It’s so close and we’re going to do _so much_ cool stuff. And you can meet him! Please, Essek?”

“Yes, please do stay until morning,” Yasha says. “So everyone has a chance to say a proper goodbye.”

Is it wrong of her to enjoy the little squeak he just made? Probably, but she’s done worse.

“So … watches and security measures starting now. Essek’s sticking around at least one more night.” Beau is listing items on her fingers as she speaks. “TravelerCon prep once we hit the island. Anything else?”

“I think that’s good, yeah?” Fjord looks to each of them in turn. “Okay then, I’ll take first watch if anyone wants to rest up.”

“I’ll join you,” Yasha says. She could do with more time in the open air. The dreams can’t get to her while she’s still awake … or so she hopes. 

_____________________

Once again, Essek finds himself alone on the deck of the ship as he stares out to sea. It’s an odd comfort in a way, having a routine. Except this new routine seems to involve taking calculated risks and later questioning his math.

In the distance, the early morning sun touches a small shape on the surface of the ocean. Rumblecusp: their destination, according to the ship’s crew. Is it Essek’s destination, though? He should be less surprised with his indecision, he supposes. He’s proving more and more lost these days. He crosses his arms, the bareness of his arms still strange to him. 

“Good morning,” Caleb calls.

Essek turns to him and smiles. “Good morning, indeed.” He nods his head toward Rumblecusp. “It seems we have arrived.”

Caleb looks past Essek toward the island and nods. “So it seems.” Caleb has freshly shaved his beard scruff, and his long red hair is combed and tied back at the nape of his neck, exposing the beautiful line of his jaw. He looks out at the ocean in silence; his expression lapses into that silent, uneasy grief that shows most when he’s stopped observing himself. Essek has only ever seen Caleb’s face truly without this edge of wariness and pain when he is sleeping; and not always even then. It hurts Essek to see it. He knows only fragments of Caleb’s history. He can only guess at the experiences from which Caleb has shaped himself, but whatever wounds he carries are far from past. The Mighty Nein talk more about pain and change and healing than anyone Essek has ever known. Even in the time he has known them all, he has seen so much of that. He has _been_ a part of that. How different are Veth, Caleb, Fjord from the ragged foreign mercenaries who walked into the Bright Queen’s court and set so much in motion? _These people will change you_ , Caleb had said to him. He wants so much for Caleb to continue to grow and thrive among them. He wonders if Caleb is happier than he was, if any of his pain has been eased?

Caleb turns back to Essek, and a grin catches the corner of his mouth as he looks at Essek appraisingly. Essek smiles, not wanting his own mood to break into Caleb’s new cheer. 

“This,” Caleb says, gesturing at Essek’s clothes. “I meant to say yesterday. This suits you very much.” His voice has lowered an octave. Essek’s stomach jumps. He moves in closer to Essek’s space, takes his hand. 

“Not the first compliment I’ve had on this outfit,” Essek says. “Marius liked it.”

Caleb twitches a smile, sweet and almost nervous. Then he hooks a firm thumb under Essek’s chin and kisses them both breathless.

“So,” Caleb says. He’s stayed close, his forehead almost bumping Essek’s. “How was your first adventure with the Mighty Nein?” 

Essek smiles and huffs. “Let us say I liked some parts of it much, much more than other parts.” 

Caleb nods, suddenly earnest. “That’s fair. Honestly, the fight with the behir was a nasty one, even by our standards. But, we are all still here, so.” His eyes flick down and to one side for a moment. Those moments rattled him too, then; it feels oddly validating. “And you have a new spell to your name.” 

“I think once more the credit is shared,” Essek says. “You, Veth, myself.”

“Our second collaborative effort,” Caleb says. 

“I’m still finding the recording process somewhat of a challenge,” Essek says. Frankly, his notes are a mess. “I envy your memory.”

Caleb shakes his head. “Ach, my brain is ridiculous. I don’t know why it works that way, but I’m grateful when it’s useful.” Essek takes the implication: there are moments when Caleb’s precise recall is not a friend to him. “I could take another look, if you like. If we can find a quiet moment.” 

There’s a breath of silence, and they hold each other’s gaze, and Essek feels the mood shift again, feels the heat rising between them. He puts a hand to the neat jut of Caleb’s hip. Caleb answers that with a hand in Essek’s hair, ruffling it out of order again, drawing him into another kiss.

“And our transmogrification spell, too,” Caleb says against Essek’s cheek. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Ah, yes.” 

Essek leans his head against Caleb’s chest and breathes him in. He still feels a little like these moments aren’t real, that it’s some fever dream he’s having back in his tower, alone. He keeps coming back to the feeling that perhaps that’s all he deserves: a fleeting, forbidden fantasy of a life that will never be his. Has Essek always felt this way? 

“Will you stay?” 

Essek’s breath catches.

Caleb has fitted his chin against the top of Essek’s head, wrapped his arms around him. Essek feels the vibration of his throat as he speaks. “At least for a few more days…” Caleb’s voice trails off. 

Ridiculously, Essek is taken aback. He knew this question must be answered, yet still, he does not know how to start. He could teleport to his tower right now, if he wanted, but there is no telling when he could find reason enough to leave his post again without drawing suspicion. How simple it sounds, though: to take his leave, wish them well, casually suggest they might aid each other again. To savour the comforts of his home, in peaceful solitude, and tomorrow to resume his rounds, the knotted threads of court intrigue and the habit of lying and concealing everything from the monstrous to the inconsequential: perpetually, habitually. To resume the daily tasks of the past decades instead of doing the things he has spent a lifetime happily avoiding—hiking in jungles, diving in lakes, fighting legendary monstrosities and subterranean pests. He could be fighting battles that he knows how to fight. 

The thought of any of that, of all of that, pulls a knot tight in his stomach. 

After a moment, Caleb continues in that soft voice of his, the one so full of tenderness and care that it pokes painfully at every awful part of Essek, at all of his shame and guilt.

“I know I’m asking for a lot here. I do. It’s just … we have much to talk about, you and I. And not only the spells, though I would very much like to discuss those as well. Just … give me a little more time to figure it all out.” He kisses the top of Essek’s head. “Give us a little more time.”

That _us_ breaks Essek, just a little. He wraps his arms around Caleb’s back and presses closer to him. Essek cannot remember ever having had this feeling, not just attraction but this deep hunger for the comfort and peace of being in each other’s arms. Yet again, Essek hardly recognises himself. All his certainties are collapsing, these days. No part remains safe of the edifice he’d built around himself for his protection, his advancement. Perhaps the foundations were poor to begin with. Yet, he has no idea what he is or who he is without it all; and the idea of abandoning his old life is as terrifying, if not more, as that of returning to it. 

… and there are bagpipes again. The haunting melody cuts through the quiet morning air, briefly interrupting his thoughts. 

Perhaps it makes sense to postpone such a decision another day or two. At the very least, he needs another day to complete the spell notations Caleb has promised to him. That would be a reasonable concession: time enough to complete his notes, and also possibly to discuss this … _thing_ that is brewing between them, if he can focus himself enough to examine it.

“I could perhaps remain another day or so. Anything beyond that would need … planning.”

Caleb leans down and kisses the corner of Essek’s jaw. “I can work with that,” he whispers. 

The heat of it flashes down Essek’s cheek, his neck, and oh it feels good in that moment, untainted by consequence, past or future. It’s intoxicating; and the fear that he may be throwing himself into it like a half century student after matriculation doesn’t escape his notice. 

Still, Essek has exercised an abundance of caution over the years, and despite that fact, he has still found himself deeply in dangerous waters with no sign of rescue. Perhaps it’s time to take the plunge willingly, see how far he lasts before reaching the bottom. It’s a laughable thought until he realises he might actually mean it. 

Caleb caresses the back of Essek’s neck as they stand together in the warm morning breeze, the music oddly fitting the scene. Distantly, he can hear the sounds of the Mighty Nein joining them on deck as they take over for the night crew. Essek’s instinct to pull away and make himself presentable battles with his desire to prolong this embrace; he hates that this instinct calls in his mother’s voice. Caleb has shown no such struggles since that night. Essek _would_ like the time to discuss why that is, test them against his current working theories. 

If he doesn’t make a choice soon, Essek may find himself drowning … but right this second, right now, he’s finding it difficult to care.

**Author's Note:**

> All of Essek's Graviturgy spells can be found in detail [here at this page](http://dnd5ed.wikidot.com/wizard:graviturgy) or in the official Wildemount Guidebook.


End file.
